by Yael Hedaya
Then he imagined Shira who rode him as he held her breasts. He tried to guess what kind of breasts she had, because it was hard to tell with those bulky sweaters she wore. Mid-sized, he thought, neither big nor small, medium and perfect in their mediocrity. He had no idea where she had suddenly sprung from but he was grateful for her presence, as if they had arranged to meet here at this time on this floor in this position, and he came, sensing—through the pleasure—Esti’s surprise, as she choked and stopped moving.
She rolled over on her side, with her head resting on her arm, and stroked his thigh with her other hand. He sat with his legs spread, listening to the refrigerator’s hum, to the oven timer ticking, as if he were waiting for a buzz to tell him when he could get up and go. He touched her cheek lightly and said, “Should I get you a glass of water?” She shook her head. “I’ll get you one,” he said, because he wanted to get up, and he quickly put on his underwear and pants, and took a glass off the drying rack and filled it with water, and leaned over and gave it to her. She sat up and took a tiny, dry sip and gave it back to him, and he put the glass on the counter. She seemed to have been injured in a motor accident and was lying there, on the ceramic road, while they waited for help.
He put on his undershirt and shirt, took his cigarettes out of his pocket, and asked if he could smoke. She nodded and said there was an ashtray in the drawer under the microwave. He thanked her and took out a glass ashtray printed with a construction company’s logo. He wanted to apologize to her, but didn’t know what for. Esti got up and put her clothes on. She looked sleepy, thoughtful, and he put a hand on her shoulder and asked if everything was all right, and she nodded and said she was going to the bathroom.
When she came back she said there was a cake in the fridge; yesterday was her birthday and her mother had brought a wonderful cake. “Happy birthday! I wish I’d known!” It sounded stupid, mean even, because what would he have done had he known, bought her something? Tried a little harder not to come in her mouth? He hated himself—he hated himself intensely—but his body hated no one now.
“I’m not hungry,” he said.
“Coffee? I’m making some anyway,” she said, as if she didn’t expect him to take her up on the offer. He did, to postpone his escape a little longer, to not be a complete son of a bitch.
“Esti,” he said, when they sat at the table drinking their coffee, and he found himself nibbling one of the chocolate-chip cookies left on the dish; he thought they had soaked up some moisture during what had happened here in the kitchen. “I feel a little uncomfortable about what we did just now.” He turned to the microwave because he couldn’t look in her eyes. “I mean, it was good for me, really good, but I just feel uncomfortable with the whole situation, with the fact that I may have unintentionally made you think I was interested in a relationship.” He heard himself speaking these words and refused to believe it; he never knew he could produce these clichés, that he was capable of tossing them out so easily; he was like one of those vending machines: very clumsy, very necessary, and completely unreliable. “I haven’t been in a relationship with a woman for a long time. Any kind of relationship,” he stressed and hoped she’d understand, but she had fixed her gaze at a large calendar hanging on the wall. “And the thing is, I don’t think I’m capable of being in a relationship now. Not a real one.”
“Just one-night stands?” she asked stiffly, aiming her words at March.
“No! What makes you say that? I’m really not built for one-night stands, I’m not interested in one-night stands! Really, really not at all!”
“What then?” she asked, and finally looked at him.
He took another cookie and crammed it in his mouth. “I don’t know. I know it sounds terrible, but I really don’t know.”
“Do you need some time then?”
“No!” He panicked. “It’s not a matter of time. Esti, what happened between us shouldn’t have happened. Certainly not with you. You work at my daughter’s school, we’ve known each other for years, and it would have been better, if I was going to have a one-night stand—if that’s what you want to call it—for it not to be with someone like you.”
“Someone like me?”
“But I was attracted to you,” he lied, to avoid her question. “I was so attracted to you.”
“And you haven’t been with someone for a long time.”
“In bed, you mean?”
“In bed,” she said, and her eyes pierced the floor again.
“Yes. A very long time.”
“Since your wife, of blessed memory?”
“Yes, since my wife, of blessed memory,” he said, and let out a nervous giggle.
“What’s funny?”
“Nothing. It just seemed funny to say ‘my wife, of blessed memory.’”
“That’s what one says, isn’t it?” She was hurt.
“I know, I know. It’s just … it just suddenly sounded funny.”
“So really you’re trying to tell me that this was an isolated thing and we’re not going to see each other again.”
“Yes. Well, no.”
“No?”
“Because we’ll see each other, won’t we? At school. I’m sure Dana will be sick lots more times.” He said this as if it offered some sort of compensation. “So of course we’ll see each other.” He felt loathsome. He felt loathsome and hungry and wished he’d accepted the cake, because how many more cookies could he gobble down without her thinking he was a total pig? He got up and did the opening steps of his departure dance: went over to her, put his hand on her shoulder, rubbed his nose in her hair, and said, “Smells good.”
“Thank you,” she spat.
“Hug,” he ordered, and got her up on her feet and wrapped his arms around her and pulled her to his chest and lifted her chin up and looked into her eyes and asked, “Are you okay?” She nodded, and he asked, “Really, truly?” and hated himself again, and she nodded again. “Dana’s waiting for me,” he lied, “I have to go.” He kissed her on the lips, a soft and long and lying kiss.
When they stood at the door Esti hugged herself, wrapping her arms around her shoulders as if she were cold. He knew that stance. At once he was revisited by pictures of women he had left standing that way, alongside doors, hugging themselves. When he was young, he had thought it was their way of clinging to him one last time before he left, but today he knew it was their way of scorning him.
“Okay, so we’ll still see each other, right?” he said, and Esti nodded. “Good night then,” he said, and released one of her arms from her embrace of herself, held her hand, and squeezed it in his own, a kind of comforting squeeze like the kind you give mourners. He whispered, “Bye, Esti, good night.”
She shut the door behind him.
( 21 )
He left Rona and Shira virtually identical messages about Friday night’s meal. He told them to come whenever they wanted—seven, eight—trying to sound indifferent, and that they didn’t need to bring anything. He also left his address for Shira, just in case. Then he went out to the butcher. It had been over a year since he’d bought steaks, and he assumed the butcher wouldn’t recognize him.
He was unable to erase the image of Esti curled up on the kitchen floor. Strangely, he didn’t feel even a shred of guilt. When he had come home that night, he had taken three schnitzels out of the freezer and thrown them into the frying pan, then listened to the sizzling that sounded very noisy in the silence of 1 A.M. Then he washed the dishes, went into his study, turned on his computer, and wished he had Solitaire.
He went into Dana’s room, which was so neat one might suspect it belonged to an elderly spinster. He found Shira’s novel on her bed; between the front cover and the first page was a bookmark with pictures of Dalmatians on it. He sat on the bed and started reading, curious as to how the sentences appeared to his daughter. His devious daughter. Soon she would turn eleven. He got off her youth bed, straightened the now-wrinkled sheets, and as he brushed his teeth he thought about th
e term youth bed, which struck him as ridiculous. He walked around the apartment with its odors of frying, shut the windows, turned off the lights, and when he went into his room and undressed he told himself, Now I’m getting into my adult bed, and pulled up the blanket. His body was calm and empty.
He wondered what kind of teenager Dana would be and when she would start to hate him; perhaps she already did. When she was a baby he had often tried, never successfully, to picture what she would look like as a woman. Lately he had trouble remembering what she looked like as a baby. He saw her in his mind’s eye, sleeping with Tamar in a bed that opened out to two twin beds, and he thought of Tamar, who even now, although her body was boyish and thin, was somehow sexy and standoffish in a way Dana was not, even though she was more developed than Tamar. Last week, when she had been at home sick, he had noticed that her sweatshirt, the one she liked and which she had outgrown, revealed two small fleshy pillows in the place where, until not long ago, there had been only babyish nipples, and it embarrassed him.
“You need new sweats,” he said, as he handed her a cup of tea on the living room couch, where she was watching TV. “I need to get some too, so if you’d like we can go when you’re feeling better.” She agreed feebly and went on staring at the screen.
He must have predicted the changes before they had occurred. The fact was, he had been careful recently not to walk into the bathroom when she was there, and he knocked on her bedroom door before going in to say good night. Now he wondered if he’d have to start being careful when he hugged her. He didn’t want to be one of those fathers who made a big deal out of their daughters’ adolescence, embarrassing them with their own awkwardness. Although during the years of his own adolescence he had begun to disparage his father, he was grateful to him for accepting his son’s exhausting transition from boy to young man without exclaiming at all the little changes—the hint of a mustache or a changing voice—as he heard other fathers do with their sons. His father was so engulfed in his study that when he noticed one day that some other man had moved into his house—taller and more depressive—he didn’t ask any questions.
In four years Dana would be fifteen, and he might find her sprawled on the couch watching TV every evening. She might reply to his questions in an unfamiliar voice that he would do well to get used to now. When she was fifteen they would no longer be able to go shopping for clothes together. They would no longer hug. A moment before he fell asleep it occurred to him that when she was fifteen he would be fifty. Then he would need an old person’s bed.
There was no reason to feel guilty, he reassured himself, as he walked into the butcher’s shop. He had behaved as any other man would have, and while Esti had been giving him a blow job, millions of women around the world had been giving blow jobs to millions of men. The butcher did remember him and greeted him warmly, coming out from behind the counter and putting a heavy hand on his shoulder. “I thought you’d turned vegetarian!” he chided him.
“God forbid!” Yonatan said, and shrank away from the hand. The butcher slapped his back and went back behind the counter. He smelled of blood.
Yonatan asked for four pounds of steak, and the butcher disappeared into the huge refrigerator, came back, and presented him with various cuts, holding them up so he could examine them closely. Yonatan loved meat. He found it hard to believe that he’d gone for more than a year without eating a steak. Was he punishing himself for something, or was it laziness, some kind of culinary senility? The butcher highly recommended a particular cut, and Yonatan said he would take it. He looked at the huge man’s chest as he sliced the beef for him, and at his palms, which looked as marbled and aged as his cuts of meat, and thought this man was the perfect stereotype of a butcher. He asked him for a few slices of bacon as well, and was suddenly overcome with a desire to buy a huge variety of other cuts, to stock up his freezer, fill up his life with meat. The butcher wrapped the steak and the bacon and Yonatan paid, thanked him, promised to come back soon, and went out onto the street.
He went to the market to look for asparagus, and when he couldn’t find any at the first stall, he decided he would be better off making something else, something more original, so he wouldn’t appear to be imitating Rona’s meal. He bought artichokes as an appetizer and three types of lettuce, and decided on baked potatoes as a side dish—something simple and modest, so his steaks could be the star. On the way home he thought about the bacon and eggs he would make himself for a late breakfast and was filled with joy. He was amazed by the way food, especially thinking about food, made him happy, but he knew it wasn’t the food itself, fine as it might be, but rather the hours of preparation and the minutes of eating that gave him some sense of normalcy, of belonging—the illusion provided by a good meal.
He was glad to have put himself in this trap of entertaining, and before he turned down Bialik he stopped at a little housewares store and bought a set of wineglasses and six straw place mats he took a liking to. Then he went up to his apartment, put the meat in the fridge, and played his messages—there was only one, from his mother, inviting them for lunch on Saturday and complaining she hadn’t seen them for ages. In the kitchen, he made himself bacon and eggs and decided to tell his mother that he and Dana would come. That way he would have a weekend of activities and wouldn’t even have to try and write. He stood looking at the strips of bacon curling in the pan and the eggs hardening around them and felt happy.
But Esti lying on the ceramic tiled floor would not leave his mind. As he ate, he tried to reconstruct their conversation but was unable to do so. Then he tried to remember what she had been wearing, but could only recall the bra tossed on the counter with one shoulder strap hanging in the sink. How quickly his fears—years’ worth of carefully honed anxieties—had turned into one reasonable erection. How his yearnings had lost their complicated names and all flowed into her mouth. He felt a little guilty about that—she had really looked as though she had not been expecting it—and he could have at least been more considerate. On the other hand, he thought, as he bit into the last strip of bacon, he required some consideration too. He hadn’t slept with anyone for almost five years and had even stopped fantasizing—five years that were, in effect, the beginning of his forties—perhaps not a man’s best years but certainly not his worst. Half a decade of abstinence had concluded with one blow job, not an especially good one but not bad either.
He looked at his empty plate, dotted with grease, and lit a cigarette. It occurred to him that he himself was the perfect stereotype of a forty-five-year-old leftist widower who had a preadolescent daughter and casual sex.
( 22 )
She almost called at the last minute to say she couldn’t make it: she felt she was already in enough trouble. But she decided that canceling would make things even more complicated than simply showing up for dinner in a relaxed, friendly, expectation-free way. She put the bottle of wine she’d bought in her bag, put on her denim jacket over an old unflattering sweater she had been wearing all day, and quickly walked through the park, convincing herself that it wouldn’t make any difference whether she got there early or on time.
She arrived at seven-thirty. Dana opened the door for her and she heard Yonatan asking, “Who is it?”
“It’s Shira!” Dana said.
“Shira?” Yonatan called out.
Shira yelled out, “Hi, it’s me!” and the girl made a sweeping hostess gesture with her arm and ushered her in.
There were no smells attesting to cooking and, apart from a large table in the living room, where Dana led her, there were no signs of dinner. On the contrary, the house looked as if he hadn’t been expecting guests at all. From somewhere in the apartment, Yonatan shouted that he was coming. The Voice of Music was playing the final movement of the piece she had started listening to at home.
“Dad’s shaving,” Dana said. “Want to drink something?”
She said she didn’t. “Am I early?”
“Yes. I mean, no. I mean, I don’t know.�
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“Nice apartment,” she said, and Dana smiled shyly. Shira wondered how, in fact, a child was supposed to react to such politesse.
“You haven’t seen all of it, so how do you know it’s nice?” Dana asked.
“I’m guessing. I know these old apartments. I live in one too.”
“You do? Do you also have three rooms?”
“Two. Do you have three?”
“Three and a half. My dad has a study that used to be a balcony we closed off. Want to see my room?”
“Yeah, why not?” Shira said, and got up from the couch. As she followed Dana down the hallway, she heard Yonatan coughing in the bathroom, a deep smokers’ cough. Then he cleared his throat and spat.
Dana turned her head to Shira and smiled, embarrassed. “Dad, I’m showing Shira my room,” she called out, perhaps to prevent him from making any more noises.
“Okay,” he said, and she heard him turn the faucet on. “I’m coming in a minute. Sorry.”
“No need to be,” Shira said cheerfully to the closed door and thought about the man who for the last four days had seemed so strong by virtue of his absence. He had suddenly stopped being a sexy fable of power and abandonment, now that she saw his apartment, which wasn’t nice at all but claustrophobic, now that she heard him coughing and spitting and imagined him leaning over the sink, perhaps an old sink like hers, webbed with veins of cracks and rust.
Before she walked into Dana’s room, everything she had seen thus far fell into one picture—the dark entrance with the coatrack bowing under the weight of winter items, coats and scarves, beneath which peeked the pink pompom of a girl’s woolen hat; the table in the middle of the living room, reminding her, in its detachment, of Passover Seder night; the living room itself, which crowded around the table and looked embarrassed and surprised by the presence of a stranger; and then the hallway and the bathroom door with frosted glass in its upper half—all these seemed to be pieces in a puzzle of despondency.