Accidents: A Novel

by Yael Hedaya

  “Oh,” Esti said, and leaned back in her seat. Now that the atmosphere in the car had changed she could also relax. “That’s Avinoam Sharir. Did he get on your nerves?”

  “He’s a real pain,” he said.

  “He’s also a widower.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. Not that I meant to put you in some niche of widowers or anything like that.”

  “No, it’s interesting. What does he do?”

  “He’s a composer. He’s actually quite successful.”

  “Yes, I think I’ve heard the name.”

  “His wife died of cancer. He has two kids. A girl Dana’s age, and a boy in the first grade. Cute kids.”

  “When did she die?”

  “About a month ago,” she said. “We went to visit him from school when he was sitting shiva.”

  “Where does he live?” Yonatan asked, because he suddenly had an urge to know more about the other widower, and he wanted to prolong the conversation.

  “Some alley near Meir Park. I don’t remember the name.”

  “He’s my neighbor, then.”

  After they passed Rabin Square, she asked him to turn right and then left and practically in the same breath she asked if he wanted to come up for coffee, and he agreed. When they got into the elevator they kept on talking about the widowed composer, even though there was nothing left to say. Yonatan felt that Esti was struggling to come up with things to say about him, supplying mean details about past events that had shown up his cheapness.

  “Thriftiness, it’s called these days,” he said.

  “Yes, thriftiness. But you know, it’s not nice to gossip about widowers.”

  “Well, as a widower, I give you permission,” he said, and when they reached the fourth floor and stepped out of the elevator, and he stood behind Esti while she searched her bag for the keys, he realized the tedious conversation about Avinoam Sharir was foreplay for sex that he didn’t want.

  ( 20 )

  Esti said she’d make some coffee, and Yonatan followed her into the kitchen, which was remodeled and huge compared to his own. “Wow,” he said, “this is great!” even though he didn’t mean it.

  “Really? You like it?” Esti asked.

  He nodded. “It’s really very nice.” He leaned against the black marble countertop. “And so clean!” He realized he had heard himself utter the same line somewhere else, but couldn’t remember where.

  Esti smiled shyly and said, “That’s the easy part. I have a cleaning lady.”

  “We need one too, urgently.” He scanned the ceramic floor tiles that showed his reflection, buttery and distorted like his compliments.

  “Don’t you have one?”

  “No, we really should.”

  She nodded in agreement. “Of course, with a kid in the house.”

  “Actually, the kid is not the one who makes the mess.”

  She laughed and asked if he wanted her cleaner’s phone number and he said he did—why not?—but knew he wouldn’t call her. She asked what he wanted to drink, and he asked for Turkish coffee with milk.

  “Don’t you feel like something a little more stylish?”

  “Stylish?”

  “I can make drip coffee,” she said in a seductive voice, and he said he would prefer Turkish.

  “A mug or a cup?”

  “Cup.”

  “Sugar?”

  “No.” He watched her pour water into the cup and stir the coffee; then she made instant coffee for herself. She stood on tiptoe to open one of the light wooden cabinets, took out a packet of chocolate-chip cookies, and placed a few of them on a dish. He thought it wasn’t a bad idea, to sleep with her; she seemed like a good candidate for breaking the fast.

  “Shall we sit in the living room?” she asked, and he carefully picked up his coffee and followed her down a long hallway. The floor, which was marble or faux marble, was scattered with little rugs and he slipped on one of them and almost fell. “Careful!” she said and turned to look at him. They went into the living room.

  There was something touching about the room’s ugliness. The couches, the drapes, the coffee table with a fruit bowl in its center, the wine-colored rug—they all looked as if they had been bought to be used by the family that would soon follow, but they remained as they had been: new, spotless, without history.

  He sat on the loveseat and Esti sat opposite him, in the center of the three-seater, and wiped her glasses with the hem of her blouse. She now looked more like a mole than a bee.

  “Is the coffee okay?” she asked, after he took a sip and put the cup back on the table.

  “Excellent,” he said, and wondered what she was like in bed. Ilana, whom he had thought at first would be boring simply because she looked so normal, had amazed him when they were together for the first time, with her absolute lack of inhibitions.

  A week after they had eaten meatballs at her sister’s, they went to Jerusalem and had dinner with his parents, and he didn’t know which was more embarrassing, the fact that for the first time in his life he had brought a woman home or the pleading faces of approval that his mother transmitted to him all evening.

  On the way home, as they drove down the steep Castel bends, Ilana said she thought she was falling in love with him. He kept quiet. She turned her head to the window and repeated, in her American accent, “I think I’m falling in love with you.”

  He wasn’t surprised. Most of the women he went out with fell in love with him at some point, but he had never heard the words uttered with such simplicity, in the same tone Ilana had used moments ago to say she liked his mother’s food.

  “Did you hear me?” she said after a few moments, and turned off the radio. “I think I’m falling in love with you. What do you have to say about that?”

  He said nothing, flattered, but started planning the breakup.

  Then she opened her mouth again and said she wanted to sleep with him. Then she turned the radio back on because the silence must have become unbearable for her too. He still said nothing, slightly angry, and tried to concentrate on the jazz program on Channel One. He felt like hurting her, to teach her a lesson for being so bold, for her lack of respect for words.

  “So?” she said. “Are you going to keep quiet all the way to Tel Aviv?”

  He nodded in the dark.

  “That’s a shame. You know what, then? Forget what I said. Let’s be friends. You seem like a nice guy.”

  “A nice guy?” He burst out laughing.

  “Yes.” She sounded hurt. “What’s so funny?”

  “Nothing. Just … nothing.”

  Then they were quiet again, and without knowing where the words came from as they escaped from his mouth independently, as if they were a feeling rather than its messenger, he said, “If you still feel like it, I don’t mind.” Now he was the one looking at her, nodding in the dark.

  He got off at the Latrun intersection and turned onto a dirt road that led into a forest, and when he stopped and turned the engine off, Ilana got out of the car, opened the back door, and sat down in the backseat. She giggled and started taking her clothes off quickly, covering his reluctant body with little kisses and bites as it joined hers, unaware that she was going to be broken up with that same night.

  He tried to get it over with quickly, ignoring her touch, though it was actually pleasant and new and humorous. He reminded himself that it had been a few weeks since he had slept with anyone, and so, at least from his point of view, his behavior was justified. He considered himself an excellent lover, but that night he didn’t care; something in him wanted to punish this American woman who had tempted him in such a sexless, efficient way. He leaned back in the Citroën’s seat and let her straddle him. He liked that position because it allowed him to be lazy, and he looked into her face, amused and slightly less angry when she came. She immediately opened her eyes and said, “Now you,” and he didn’t know that he was about to fall in love with her.

  He missed her. Esti’s ugly room
contained not a single object he liked, not one that could justify forgiving the rest of them; they made him miss his old car and his old life and his wife, and the days when it was still imaginable that he would sleep with someone in the backseat of a car, and he thought that he had been widowed and grown old at the same time.

  He must have smiled, because Esti asked what was funny, and he said he had just thought of something. “Something interesting?” she asked, and he said no. She asked if he wanted more coffee, because he had emptied his cup, and he said yes, why not, because he knew this was his opportunity, and that if he could only sit here long enough, he would eventually start, somehow, to want her.

  She got up and took the cup and the dish of cookies, two of which he had eaten, into the kitchen. He sank into the shiny purple upholstery of the couch, and tried to calm the part of him that wanted to get up and leave. He knew he could be bad, really bad, that he could behave like a real son of a bitch—that’s what Ilana would call behavior like his. “Son of a bitch,” she called him in English, sometimes angrily and sometimes affectionately, but when he heard Esti rinsing out the cups in the kitchen, he told himself he was getting carried away again. Why think in terms of good and bad, when this was simply sex with an available and fairly attractive woman. Yes, he thought, she didn’t look bad at all. He got up and went into the kitchen and without a second thought—without any more thoughts at all—he put his hand on her waist as she stood on tiptoe to get the back cookies out of the cabinet. Son of a bitch, he told himself, feeling a shiver run down her back. When she turned, he grabbed her hand and focused on her eyes, catching her with a look that said everything she thought of him was true—she didn’t even know the half of it—and he was a son of a bitch.

  The second he touched her she knew she was making a mistake. A mistake, her shivering spine screamed, but Yonatan pushed her back on the counter and held her face with both hands and kissed her, and the mistake took on the flavor of teeth and saliva. She wanted to ask, How long? How long has it been since your last time? She wanted to ask if she was the first since his wife, because the force of his biting kiss told her it had been awhile. It had been for her as well—too long—so that suddenly what they were about to do was not a mistake but healthy, normal; it was right. But still she hoped for a little more tenderness.

  She kept on hoping even when she found herself standing facing him in the kitchen undressing, looking down at the ceramic tiles. She didn’t have the courage to ask if it might not be better to move to the bedroom, as if it wouldn’t count if they did it here; perhaps that was the only way he could do it, but she wanted it to count. He didn’t undress but turned sideways as he pawed one of her breasts, and she leaned against the counter and tried to suck her stomach in. She kept her underpants on and reached out to unbutton his shirt and, with the other hand, stroked his cock through the corduroy fabric and didn’t know which was more pleasant, the touch of the flesh or the touch of the fabric.

  He studied her nipples, then her stomach; a feathery line of black hair, neither repulsive nor attractive, descended from her navel. Her panties looked like the cotton ones Ilana used to wear, but she had preferred colored ones and Esti’s were off-white, like her bra, which he peeked at from the corner of his eye as it lay on the counter, one strap drooping over the side of the sink. He worried that it might fall in and get wet and told himself, I’m not concentrating.

  He was suddenly embarrassed by the large mole between his shoulders, which the nurse’s hands were now touching. He was afraid she would be disgusted, and afraid he would be repulsed by her touch, but he had an erection for some reason, and he kissed her again and made a note to himself that he was kissing too hard, like an adolescent, with teeth but no tongue, like he used to kiss women he didn’t like. He stood across from her with an open shirt and a white cotton undershirt beneath it, and an erection that the corduroy both concealed and emphasized. He shoved his hand between her legs and pulled her panties down with the other hand, and she thought she deserved more, not this act that was slightly violent.

  A compromise between violence and boredom, he thought; he was full of desire, but he didn’t know what it was that he desired. Without even wanting to, he found himself noticing needless details: the tuft of black fuzz on her abdomen, the way she held her stomach in, and the goose bumps on her arms, one of which rested on the counter while the other reached forward to massage his penis. At least the sex will be wild, she thought; he thought, Get it over with as quickly as possible.

  He unbuttoned his pants and pulled them down with his underwear and remained standing in them, as if they were shackles around his ankles. He felt stupid, and she moved him aside until he took one foot out of the mess of material and then the other foot, like a child undressing, and she sat on the floor and quickly took off her panties, and he sat opposite her and pushed her back until she was lying on the floor with her head touching the kitchen table leg, and he lay on top of her and kissed her and felt her mouth reaching out to the man she thought he was, to the man he could be but not with her, and her tongue traveled through his mouth while his remained obstinately stuck to the roof of his mouth. He suddenly thought of the words from the oath—If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, and almost burst out laughing. His lips trembled and Esti misinterpreted him again, and with her tongue still in his mouth, she mewled a satisfied murmur.

  He suddenly let go of her, sat up, leaned back against the fridge, and said, “I can’t, Esti. I’m sorry.”

  She sat up and stroked his face. “It’s okay, I understand, we got a little carried away.”

  They sat facing each other, cross-legged, and he saw her stomach fold over her crotch, and she looked at his thin legs and at his balls that shyly adhered to one thigh, and at his penis shrinking above them, and whispered in his ear, “It’s really okay, Yonatan, I understand.” But the name Yonatan suddenly turned her on. So many times she had whispered it to herself and scribbled it on sheets of paper: dozens of times she had pronounced it nonchalantly when she called to let him know his daughter was sick. Yonatan, she whispered now in her heart and felt how, despite the disappointment, despite the compassion, something in her insisted on this. Although it was obviously a mistake, something demanded it insistently, because she deserved it. She realized now that his evasive shyness, the way he always said “I’ll see you soon, Esti” and lowered his eyes, was directed precisely toward this great moment, which in truth she had planned quite differently—it was supposed to happen over a weekend in a hotel, or at least in a bed, not on a floor that still smelled of cleaning solvents. Still, this was the moment and she couldn’t let it slip away.

  She stroked his neck and whispered in his ear, “Yonatan, are you all right?”

  He nodded quickly and said, “You?”

  She nodded and gently pushed her tongue into his ear, and he pulled away, smiled awkwardly and looked at the brown specks dancing in her green eyes, and thought, A cross between a bee and a mole. His legs started falling asleep and again he felt her tongue in his ear, and her teeth gently tugged his earlobe. My ear is attached to her palate, he told himself, but he didn’t laugh, and something moved down there against his thigh.

  Yes, she thought to herself, he’s starting to rouse, and she went on cautiously nibbling his ear, whispering, “Yonatan, Yonatan,” and feeling how from one Yonatan to the next she could barely control herself; she was ready for his penetration as she had never been ready in her life. “Yonatan,” she whispered.

  He whispered back, slightly alarmed, “What?”

  “Nothing, Yonatan,” she said.

  He thought of Yonah Wallach’s poem, “Yonatan.” He couldn’t stand it; if she uttered one more Yonatan he would get up and leave, but he knew he wouldn’t. Her lips broke away from his ear, and her head slid down between his legs, and her teeth gently nibbled at his penis, and he pulled her head away and lifted it and whispered, “Esti…” I can’t, Esti, he wanted to say. She was heartened upon hearing her name and put
her head down between his legs again, and he leaned back against the fridge, felt its vibrations against his back, and meant to get up, slowly, so as not to insult her, but she spread his legs and sucked him so strongly that she managed to birth a semi-erection.

  She knew it was going to happen now, they were going to do it, and she wanted to suggest that they move to the bedroom, where it would be more comfortable—she was glad he cleaning lady had changed the sheets yesterday—or at least that they have a glass of wine, because there was a bottle in the fridge. But she didn’t dare lift her head up, and she realized that even here, on the floor, would be fine, somewhat passionate even, like those scenes in the movies, and she even thought she might not insist on a condom. Yonatan, Yonatan, she said, silently over and over, and thought she wouldn’t mind having a child by him, by Yonatan.

  He couldn’t stand the sight of her face, so full of love and compassion and encouragement that threatened to destroy his half erection, but he was going to come in her mouth, so when she looked up from between his legs and tried to speak, he did something he had never done to any woman, ever: he pushed her head back down.

  Since it was too late to retreat—he knew it was coming and he anticipated it like pain—he told himself that Dana was transferring next year anyway and he wouldn’t have to see Esti again. There would be no more winters with morning phone calls, which would now be impossible. Then suddenly he had a terrible thought: what if Rona can’t transfer the girls to another school and the nurse takes revenge on his daughter, she sees her burning up with a fever, fainting in the hallway, turning blue and wheezing and choking, but does nothing, doesn’t call him, lets her die because of him.

  All of a sudden he saw an image of Ilana, sobbing in his arms after the ambitious cake she had made for their first anniversary had burned. She said she had wanted to make a “glamorous” cake. He laughed and wondered which English word she had thought of that had led her to use the Hebrew glamorous. He had meant to ask but never got around to it, and now he remembered Esti asking him if he wanted something more stylish to drink, and he felt how this fresh memory was defiling the old one with all its sadness, and so to protect it he remained with it, caressing Ilana’s face and hair just as he had done then, when she had cried and he had honestly tried to comfort her but couldn’t help laughing—at first a private laughter that gurgled in his stomach, then a laughing fit that eventually swept her along.