Accidents: A Novel

by Yael Hedaya

  “Did you go to parties too?” he asked, when they drove away from the building and headed toward the Cinemateque.

  “We had lots, but I never went. It was beneath me. Anyway, I had a boyfriend when I was a junior, so I didn’t need those parties to hook up. I did plenty of fooling around as it was.”

  “Yes. But on the other hand there’s nothing quite like those hookups. It’s the kind of sex you can never experience again. Not that I want to—I mean, it wasn’t that amazing—but there’s something about the way we hooked up back then—think about slow-dancing in total darkness—that was a kind of delightful prologue to everything we found out later. I often try to describe those hookups in my writing, and I can’t do it.”

  “You just did.”

  “Maybe it’s not the city I miss but the hooking up,” he said, and they drove on in silence until they came to King David Street. He pointed out the YMCA building and told her he believed this was where he decided to be a writer, after falling in love with the organ music. “I sound so old, don’t I?”

  “No. In fact you sound very young.”

  He asked if she wanted to get a drink or if she’d rather go back to Tel Aviv. When she said she’d rather go back he was disappointed because he suddenly realized that he was hitting on her: This whole trip, and especially the tour of Old Katamon and the German Colony, was a seduction trip and she was rejecting him. They drove in silence all the way out of Jerusalem, just listening to the radio, and when they started talking again it no longer had the magic of their previous exchange, when they were driving around the streets of his childhood. They talked about parking problems, about the nightclubs that kept opening up all around them, about the constant noise; it seemed that the change of scenery, now flat and monotonous, had brought with it a change in topic.

  He wondered if she was playing him. How could it be that for a whole afternoon her arm had rubbed against his with such ease, her hand had lain in his, on his thigh; then she wanted to see where he had grown up; and now—she wanted to go home. He hated that kind of woman, although he used to be that kind of man. And again he saw the picture of Esti, except this time she was not curled up on the floor but sitting across from him, staring over his shoulder at the calendar. He had hurt her, but at least he hadn’t played her. And it wasn’t too late to call her, he thought, it had only been four days; he could even call her that evening. But he didn’t want her; he didn’t even want to want her, so it was odd to him that he couldn’t get her out of his mind. Maybe, he thought, he was preoccupied with her because she was the first woman he had hurt in the past decade.

  Shira thought the drive from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv was always either too long or too short, even though it almost always lasted fifty minutes. The last time she had been there, six months ago, when she drove her father to a neurologist at Hadassah, looking askance at her father as he watched the scenery as if he were abroad, she felt as if she was so far from home it would take her days to get back. Now, as they passed the airport, she was sorry she hadn’t taken Yonatan up on his offer to go sit somewhere and have a drink, because then they could still have been in Jerusalem—under the influence of a few beers that would have taken them somewhere else—not the place they were at now, fifteen minutes away from their separate addresses, so quiet and sober. This friendship was confusing. Perhaps, she thought, she had refused his offer because she had never yet turned him down, because without his realizing it, she had already accepted him in a thousand different ways. Today, when he took her hand and put it on his thigh, she felt he was doing it out of alarm, to restrain her, to reject her again.

  When they got off at the La Guardia exit, Yonatan sighed.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked.

  “I’m hungry. My mother would slit her wrists if she heard me, but I’m starved.”

  She almost said she was full, but she asked what he felt like.

  “Eating?” he asked, and she nodded. “I don’t know. Everything.”

  She felt like asking if he wanted to stop somewhere and get some falafel or pizza, but she asked if he wanted to come over for spaghetti.

  “Spaghetti?” he asked the windshield, in a tone that sounded disappointed. “I would kill for spaghetti.”

  “But just plain spaghetti,” she said and tried to think what ingredients she had at home.

  “I’m dying for just plain spaghetti. That’s the spaghetti of my fantasies: just plain spaghetti.”

  * * *

  At home she had three messages from her father. Yonatan sat on the couch and leafed through the paper while she stood with her back to him and listened to them, knowing he was listening too, wishing she had ignored the flashing light on the answering machine. In the first message, he said, “Hello, it’s Dad,” and then coughed deeply and moistly into the phone. She turned to look at Yonatan, and he looked up from the paper and smiled at her. “My father,” she said, and he said, “I figured.” When the coughing subsided, she thought she heard him drinking something, perhaps his morning coffee. Then he said “Shabbat Shalom” in a thick voice and hung up.

  It didn’t occur to her that the second message would also be from him. “Shira?” his voice asked, echoing as if the answering machine was a large empty room. “Shira?” Her embarrassment turned to alarm. Without turning around she knew Yonatan was listening, as tense as she was. “It’s your dad again,” he said softly. “I told him I was going out of town,” she said. “He must have forgotten.” Yonatan murmured yes.

  Then his voice came again, clear and demanding this time: “Shabbat Shalom, Shira, it’s Dad,” and in the background you could hear the hourly news bleeps from his transistor radio, then the sound of the phone being put down, and she thought that everything she had told Yonatan about her father paled against his recorded voice. Then there were three beeps announcing the end of the messages.

  When she turned around he was standing close to her, still holding the paper. He looked worried, he looked fatherly, he looked as if he wanted to kiss her.

  “I have to call him,” she apologized. “It won’t take long.”

  “Of course. No problem.”

  “I’ll take the phone into the other room,” she said, and he nodded and touched her cheek with his knuckles and sat down on the couch again. When she took the cordless phone into the bedroom and dialed her father’s number, which was the first number in the speed dial, she thought about all this touching between them; no one had ever given her so many small touches in one day. And when her father picked up and they started their dazed conversation, she suddenly got up off the bed and took the phone back to the living room, because she wanted him to hear her, to see her like this, so he could keep caressing her cheek with his eyes and ears.

  She leaned against the bookshelf, propped the phone on her shoulder, and signaled to him that she wanted a cigarette. He got up, took the pack out of his pocket, gave her a cigarette, and lit it. He stood next to her and examined her books.

  He felt sorry for her and he wanted her. He wondered if he would ever experience with his mother this terrible thing she was now experiencing with her father, and when he did, who would be there with him. He went over to the coffee table and brought her an ashtray, and she took it and nodded thankfully. He went into the kitchen and opened the fridge and took out two bottles of beer and found the bottle opener on the counter, and he went back to the living room and held up a bottle inquiringly. She nodded again, and he opened it and gave it to her. She took a sip and put the bottle down on one of the shelves and put her little finger in her mouth and started biting her nail and, without knowing where he found the courage, he gently pulled her finger out of her mouth. She smiled shyly, and he thought he had never felt so close to anyone, not even to himself, and if she had not looked so naked right now, he would have undressed her.

  She put the phone down and sighed, and he took it from her and put it in its cradle and went back to stand opposite her. She kept on standing by the bookshelf, looking exhau
sted.

  “Spaghetti?” she asked quietly, and he took her in his arms.

  They stood embraced, leaning on the bookshelf, and from his shoulder he heard her sniffle and felt the damp warmth of her tears seep into his sweatshirt. He gently tried to pull her face away from his shoulder to see her eyes, but she clung to him, her nose burrowing into his shoulder, and he put his hand on her head and whispered something meaningless and stupid and deep into her hair, and suddenly he felt that all the hugging he had ever done was training for this embrace and he wanted to cry too.

  The phone rang and they both tensed up. The machine answered and after the beep came the very friendly voice of a man who said, “Good evening, this is Gideon the electrician,” and announced that he couldn’t come the next day.

  “Wrong number,” Shira mumbled into his shoulder, and he whispered to her, “Some poor guy will sit in the dark tomorrow.” She looked up at him and said she was sorry, and he asked what for and she said she didn’t know, and he said he didn’t either, and then he kissed her.

  It amazed her how quickly she went from sadness to passion. When she bit his lip and ran her tongue from his mouth to his cheek and to his chin and into his mouth again, as if she were afraid of losing a treasure she had found, she realized that she had not gone from sadness to passion but was still in the familiar territory where the two are joined together, and that she had wasted too much of her life trying to separate them as if they were enemies.

  He put his hand on her back and walked her to the bedroom, where a lamp with a square lampshade was lit on the bureau, projecting an orange light. She sat on the edge of the bed, and he knelt at her side and pulled her boots off her feet and set them at the foot of the bureau. Then he took her sweater off, and as she lifted her arms up to help him a strip of white stomach was revealed to him, bordered between her bra and the waistband of her skirt, which made it stick out a little. He put his lips to her navel and kissed it. Then he looked up at her and she smiled shyly and closed her eyes. He reached behind her to unhook her bra, surprised to discover how slow his movements were.

  She wanted to lie on her back or on her belly, or stand up, not sit at the edge of the bed like a little Buddha, with her breasts resting on her stomach, which had been made into a ball by the tight skirt. But on the other hand there was suddenly something wonderful and reassuring about that stomach, about this truth, as if the stomach was a natural extension of her crying; she had not sensed the sobs approaching or leaving, but she now felt their effect in her body like a drug and she was no longer embarrassed. It was not the lack of embarrassment she used to feel with Eitan but something else, a sexy weakness that was like the flu, and much as she had wanted Yonatan to hear her conversation with her dad earlier, she now wanted him to see her sitting like this, on the edge of the bed, with her stomach drooping like a heavy load.

  He stood her up on her feet and opened the zipper of her skirt and pulled it down along with her stockings and underwear; then he sat her down again and looked at her. He felt overdressed, but he didn’t want to take his clothes off yet. He stroked her thighs and was dizzied by the warmth transferred from the nervous skin to his fingers. He hadn’t thought she would be so passive, but instead of disappointment he found himself turned on, turned on from the tenderness and compassion until he thought he might come, and even though he did not want to come that way, alone, fully dressed, he wondered what kind of orgasm came from such compassion.

  She kissed him, leaning forward, her stomach folding over his hand, his mouth and lips loose, almost helpless, and with her hand she held the back of his neck, half leaning on him, half holding him in place. It went on for a long time, that kiss, her mouth busy and investigating, his mouth quiet and waiting, until she got up off the bed and he straightened up too, and for a moment she held herself against him in an embrace that was both tempting and desperate. Then she turned him so his back was to the bed and sat him down on the edge, where she had sat. He leaned over to untie the laces of his green Chuck Taylors, and she pulled them off his feet, holding his feet on her stomach and tossing the shoes behind her. Then she took his socks off and looked at his bare feet; they looked pale against her skin, which he now saw was slightly darker than his.

  She took off his sweatshirt and he sucked his stomach in as if he had been punched. She knelt between his legs, leaned her head on his chest, and caressed his back. Between his shoulders her fingers found a rough mole. He flinched, trying to twist his shoulders so her hand would slide down, but she held her hand against the mole as if she were trying to calm it, not him. Then she stood him up, opened the buttons of his jeans, and pulled them down. She looked at his underpants, which were exactly as his daughter had described them at the café, faded cotton briefs of a nondescript color that might once have been blue or, possibly, green.

  It was strange for him to be suddenly, as if by chance, exactly in the place he had so wanted to be. But fantasies never bother with the little details, the clumsy ridiculous minutiae of sex, always leaving the unwanted parts on the editing-room floor. He felt exposed when she pulled his underwear off, as if along with them a layer of his skin was also peeled away, revealing the true him—chicken, as Dana had called him that time: a mongoose with a huge erection.

  She sat next to him on the bed. They were both naked now, examining each other sideways. It was an unfamiliar angle, exciting in its clumsiness. He pressed his lips against her shoulder. He wanted to ask himself why he loved her, and whether the last few years had been preparing him, unaware, for this love, but when she lay on her side with her head resting on one arm and the other arm on her hip, he knew he needed no answers. He lay on his side opposite her.

  She had never seen anyone look at her this way, and again she felt as if she wanted to cry, but this time she was afraid to lose what she had not yet gained. Tears started streaming from her eyes. He touched her cheek and pressed up against her with his body, she put one of her legs on his thigh, and they kissed quietly—a long slow haul at the end of a race.

  “We’ve had a rough day,” he whispered in her ear, and entered her.

  “Yes,” she said, flooded with happiness. “We’ve had a rough day.”

  PART FOUR

  ( 1 )

  The anxiety attack he expected the next day, like a vexing relative scheduled to arrive on a punctual train, never came.

  When they got out of bed that night, dressed, and went into the kitchen to make spaghetti, he tried to imagine how the morning would be but could not, because he had long ago forgotten how mornings were with a woman who, although his body smelled of her now and although they had cooked together and were about to eat together and go to sleep together, was still a stranger—perhaps even more of a stranger than she was before he slept with her.

  So when does a woman stop being a stranger? he wondered, as he sat at the table, chopping onions on a wooden board she set before him with a kiss on his cheek. She stood by the counter with her back to him, scratching one foot with the other while she opened a can of crushed tomatoes. She looked like a little girl, with her hair disheveled and crumpled, wearing a T-shirt with a picture of Wile E. Coyote and Roadrunner. It was still her favorite cartoon, she told him, and she wished they showed it more often on TV. He briefly had trouble reconciling her with the woman on whose stomach he had come only fifteen minutes ago, letting out a long strange yell he could barely believe.

  He never yelled in bed, but he wasn’t in the mood to contemplate the meaning of his shouting, if it even had one. He felt quiet, as if the cry had drained him of all the words and syllables and other sounds trapped in him for years, leaving him happily mute. Shira was also quiet. They exchanged a few words about the sauce: “Garlic?” she asked, dangling a bulb in front of his eyes, and he said, Lots. When she handed him the onion and chopping board and knife, he asked if she wanted a dice or a coarse chop, and she said, “It doesn’t matter.” When he insisted, she said, “Something in between.” After she opened the can, she pee
red into the fridge and turned to him with a sour face. When he asked what was wrong, she said, “There’s no basil. Not even parsley.” He waved his hand dismissively, and that was it. They said nothing more. Not even when they sat facing each other, eating spaghetti with spicy sauce; he had poured in some Tabasco at the last minute.

  He was glad when they left the dirty dishes in the sink and went back to bed, taking an ashtray, cigarettes, and two bottles of beer, as if they were about to have a long conversation. But they kept quiet. They lay across from each other and touched each other sleepily but with curiosity. Her eyes closed and her mouth fell open and he smelled the Tabasco on her breath and gently placed his fingers on her lip as if measuring a pulse; he felt his own eyes close and a wonderful weariness descend on him. He listened to the alarm clock ticking on the bureau and remembered that when he was young, and found himself spending the night in a strange woman’s bed, he would lie awake for a long time, sometimes all night. The slightest sound took on great meaning back then—a dripping faucet in the kitchen, a car honking, a TV echoing from a neighbor’s apartment, the call of a crow or a breath or a clock ticking—as if all these were parts of the body and schedule of the woman asleep next to him. These were things that did not belong to him, and never would, and made him miss his bachelor home and his bachelor bed and feel so lonely and hostile that in every drip or honk, every TV laugh or crow squawk, and every breath or tick he heard the words Go home. But Shira’s clock ticking, although very loud, reassured him now, as if it were his own alarm clock beneath the orange light of the lamp, which he now switched off, reaching carefully over Shira’s head. I’m either falling in love or getting old, he thought, and decided to let the morning decide.