“You don’t want to do investigative journalism, go undercover and see what it is like to be in this movie? What is it called—immersion journalism—live it and write it?” Wendy joked.
“Should I tell them I want to write about them or pretend I’m interested?”
“Would they really object if you wrote about them? It would be incredible publicity.”
“I’d like to write about their actual perceptions of Israel, the funny stories about misunderstanding, missed cues that they were telling us on the beach . . .” Orly took out a note pad and started writing. She laughed to herself as she remembered one of the odd moments.
Orly used the hotel phone to call, since she didn’t want him to have access to her cell phone number. When he answered and asked when he could see her, she said, “On camera or off,” and he replied, “Either.”
She told him, “I am a journalist.”
He replied, “Have you and your friend changed your minds about our movie?”
Orly continued, with Wendy looking on, “I would like to write about you and Niels and the process of making your movie.”
There was silence on the other line and then, loud enough so Wendy could hear, “What do I get from this?”
“Free publicity. If tens of thousands of people read about it, some of them are bound to purchase of your movies. It’s a method of penetrating the American market.” Wendy, sitting on her haunches on her bed, arms curled around her knees like a little kid, fell forward onto her knees and giggled at the word “penetrate.” Orly waved at her furiously not to laugh too loudly.
“No, there wouldn’t be any adverse affects.” There was again silence. “Why don’t we have coffee and discuss it? In Tel Aviv Saturday morning, Café Fleur on Rehov Sheinkin?” Orly smiled broadly at Wendy and said, “See you then.” She hung up the phone and gave Wendy a broad high-five slap. “He agreed to meet. Psych!”
Wendy did a voiceover imitation: “Our heroine, Orly Markovsky, once again proves, anything can be a career move. Picked up by the wrong guy? Write an article on him. Get depressed? Write a book. Parent with terminal illness? Write on her choice to commit assisted suicide. Orly’s guide on how to improve your career with a New Yorker article for any scenario.”
“Stop. This could really get me somewhere. You don’t want to go out dancing now, do you?” Orly started jumping and leaping around the room, pumping her hands on the air, her long black tresses flying behind her.
“When you publish this in the New Yorker I will take you dancing. Deal?”
Orly put out her hand so that Wendy had to shake it.
The next morning, Wendy and Orly lay on the beach, each with her own sunblock, SPF 30 and 4, respectively. Wendy rolled onto her side from her back and impulsively asked Orly, lying next to her, face up, “Where do you see yourself in ten years?”
“Ideally or realistically?” she queried.
“Ideally.”
“Living on the Upper East Side, writing interesting freelance pieces for good magazines, married with a kid and a nanny . . . You?”
“Tenure at a university I have at least heard of, in a reasonably large place, married, one or two kids? I feel like I am closest to door number one, tenure, though the others could happen . . .”
“Is Uri the one? Are you nervous about dating someone religious?”
Wendy raised herself on an elbow and looked over at Orly. “His allegiance isn’t only to religion. He’s kind of a satyagraha, a truth seeker, like me. You too, as an investigative journalist.”
“Everything doesn’t have to be so serious for me. This article about pornographers in the Holy Land is meaningful enough.”
“Don’t limit yourself. Maybe you will write some longer pieces that will change something, make a difference. I’d like to think my work will make a difference in the world.”
“That’s the difference between us: you think you are doing work that is not only something you are personally curious about, but will help others understand their motives.”
“No, actually, what I really like about this dissertation is giving people an opportunity to talk about their journey, seeing how they put their life story together. When they fill out a questionnaire, they tell one kind of story—my family wasn’t shomer Shabbat, or kosher, we belonged to a Reform temple and attended maybe once a year—there isn’t any evidence of Jewish connection. Then I talk to them and they say, ‘Oh I always had these spiritual yearnings and loved to read about Orthodox Jews,’ or ‘I had a grandmother who took me to shul with her.’ The story is so different when it is actually in a person’s voice.”
“Of course you’re attracted to a psychiatrist—it sounds like you are shrinking your subjects!”
Wendy leaned her head on her elbow and turned to look at Orly. “Maybe. I don’t know, Orly; I am trying so hard to make sense of my own life.”
Orly looked surprised and responded, “What’s so hard?”
“Everything. Is what I’m doing worthwhile? Should I be in graduate school or is it a total waste of time, because when I’m thirty years old I’ll have a PhD and no job and live with my parents? Will someone ever love me? Will I have kids? Will I even finish my dissertation? Am I going to stay in Israel for another year or go back to Princeton? It’s all so uncertain. I hate that.” She stopped and, with her next thought, felt tears come to her eyes. She hoped Orly, lying flat on her back with sunglasses on, wouldn’t notice. “I just don’t feel like I’ve advanced at all. When I arrived, I was trying to find the shared cab and Professor Lamdan asked me, ‘Do you know where you’re going?’ I’m still not sure. I’ve done some research, I have a start, but I haven’t started writing. I don’t know how it will turn out.” Wendy controlled the quaver in her voice before Orly noticed it.
Orly, still prone on her back, agreed without turning to Wendy. “It’s hard. I do understand the attraction of religion for your baalei teshuvah. If everything is certain and destined, life is less unknown. But, for me, having too much certainty makes life less exciting. The not-knowing is part of the game. When I walk into a party or a bar, will I attract someone? Will they be attracted to me? What will happen, when, how? I like unpredictability.”
Wendy looked away from Orly and out to the Red Sea. “The excitement and anxiety of the unknown, the plodding ordinariness of the known and secure. There has to be something in between. I wish there were some way to know, with absolute certainly, I should be here writing my dissertation. I will finish and get a job and have a career. That’s why,” she said more excitedly, “the seder felt so important. For those moments when we talked about how you can’t have a seder without asking questions, I felt, Yes, I am doing the right thing. Being here, asking people questions about themselves; it is important.”
“Everyone needs affirmation,” Orly nodded. “It must be hard, doing all this writing and not being able to publish it for a long time, not having a sense of whether people will read it. It is so different from what I do: write, send to editor, publish.”
“That’s the thing: you know there is a point to your work. You write, get published, get paid. For me, I write, people judge it, maybe eventually I’ll send it off to a journal, and perhaps, oh, a hundred people may read it.”
“Why do it?” Orly asked innocently.
“I like trying to fit different kinds of information together. I like writing and I like teaching—academia will be a good career for me.”
“Stop worrying and start writing.”
“Easy for you to say. Don’t forget, we’re here for F-U-N, remember? Let me bake blissfully on the beach for the next hour.”
“F-U-N sounds good. I guess you’ve absorbed Eilat,” Orly said laughing at Wendy.
They continued to lie on the beach, absorbing the rays of the sun, each with her desired layer of sun protection, until they went to fetch their luggage and catch the bus back to Jerusalem.
On the bus, Wendy napped and attempted to read her novel, The Golden Bowl, begun on t
he plane to Israel and put aside, now taken out, a fat book in honor of the fat chunks of reading time, on the beach and on the bus, and clutching the bottle of wine she had been instructed to purchase by Orly before they left Eilat. With the reading and napping, the ride went fast, and Wendy woke, from the sun’s splendor on Eilat’s beach, to sundown in Jerusalem.
The only vehicles on the street were cabs, few and far between; Wendy and Orly each found one. Wendy’s cabbie drove her down Yafo, the main commercial street from the bus station, past the usually-bustling Mahane Yehuda market. All was completely empty; the shops of the commercial district were shuttered and locked. No one was in the street as the remnants of daylight calmly receded and it grew steadily darker.
Wendy thought that in another place it might feel creepy to see bustling streets silent. But in Jerusalem it felt normal, restful, appropriate. After ten months here, she knew this was the mode of Friday night, erev Shabbat. She thought it would feel weird to go back to the States and not see a closing down of things, a sense of restfulness, of cessation at the end of the week. In Jerusalem, things came to a halt for the Sabbath as though by force of nature.
“HomeStore” read one of the storefronts the cab passed. How can one’s home be a store? Why should a home be commodified? Comforting, that, yes, a home can be created, Wendy thought. Purchases can be made, a mood set, and voila, a home. But a home doesn’t come from the objects, she reflected.
Progressing down Shlomzion Ha-Malka Street, she thought she could hear snatches of singing from a synagogue when the cab stopped at a light. That is what makes a home, people to sing in it, she thought. Had she ever sung in her home? The one Shabbat dinner with Noah—was there singing? She couldn’t remember. Would Uri sing to her tonight? The prayer for the woman of valor?
She clutched her knapsack on her lap and felt the bottle of wine, still in one piece. She was looking forward to having whatever Uri had brought for her. Would he cook anything at her apartment? She had gotten rid of bread and cereal, but didn’t really know how to clean for Passover. Even Essie didn’t do the regimented cleaning Wendy’s returnees described, getting every surface in the kitchen disinfected with bleach in case there might possibly be hametz there. Wendy’s mother just told their cleaning lady to be extra thorough, and she put away all leavened products. Wendy hoped Uri wouldn’t expect that she do anything more exhaustive. The idea of cooking in her apartment, along with singing, excited her. It would make it a home to have snatches of melodies and cooking smells floating through her little apartment.
She hadn’t envisioned any of her apartments as homes, really, but as temporary abodes for her to eat, sleep, work, maybe bring a guy when she was lucky. None of them were places she would remain long-term. She was tired of the transience of it all—the apartments never decorated because they were short-term solutions to the problem of where to sleep, eat, and work; the friends who were people to hang out with for now because they’d all be scattered soon enough; the food that was microwaved or a powder to be transformed into something edible when boiling water was added. She was doing no more than subsisting; none of the efforts around the home were for things she was creating or building.
The cab, now on David HaMelech Street, was passing the Laromme Hotel on the right and the Yemin Moshe neighborhood of the Spicehandlers on the left. What was happening at the Spicehandler villa now? She saw people on the street turn down in the direction of the Yemin Moshe homes. Were any of them were going to the Spicehandlers’? Was their maid Graciela serving the soup?
As the cab continued onto Emek Refaim and approached within a few blocks of her apartment, she realized that she hadn’t ever had anyone welcome her home. And she thought about how, in interview after interview, it seemed like almost half or more of her interviewees came from homes where their parents had divorced, and they had spent their lives searching out a sense of home, and wholeness, that they found in Orthodox Judaism and Shabbat. They were seeking this sense of home, and being loved and welcomed in it.
She got out of the cab, took the wine and her backpack, paid the driver, and returned his greeting of “Shabbat Shalom.” As she fumbled for her key to enter, she thought she could smell roast chicken. When she got inside the entryway and opened her mail slot she sniffed again. Potatoes? Mounting the steps, her olfactory senses seemed to indicate soup. She also realized that, though she occasionally cooked something for herself, she didn’t usually smell cooking odors wafting down while she was walking upstairs. It was comfortably temperate in the early April evening, but she felt pleasantly warm as she ascended the steps.
Uri opened the door. He was wearing the male Jerusalem Sabbath uniform: white cotton button-down shirt, khaki pants, sandals, white knit kipah with dark and light blue décor crocheted in its rim. He gave her a huge hug, which she returned, though she worried that she was sweaty and smelly from the more than five-hour bus ride. He held her at a slight distance for a minute and said with the accent she still found adorable, “Wendy, you look grand. You got some nice colour on the beach.”
“Really? I got burned too, see?” she said pulling her T-shirt and sweater aside to display the sunburn on her shoulders.
“The wages of pleasure,” he said with a smile.
“Being with you is much more pleasurable than being away,” she said sincerely.
He took her hand and led her inside her apartment and gently closed the door. He again pulled her close to him, but this time planted his lips firmly on hers and kissed her, their lips tasting each other. Wendy prayed he would not try to French kiss her as she imagined the sourness in her mouth from the nap on the bus and the sharp-flavored Bissli snack she ate would be less than enticing. Fortunately, he didn’t penetrate the recesses of her mouth with his tongue.
“Are you hungry?” he asked her after their lips disengaged.
“Can I take a shower first? Then I’ll tell you . . .” Wendy said, in what she hoped was an alluring tone of voice.
“Sure,” he said, sounding a bit disappointed. He’d been shopping and cooking all day in anticipation of her return, and now that she was back, she didn’t seem interested in him or the food. “I hate long bus trips too. You need a transition from the rest of the week into Shabbos. Take a shower, change. I’ll be reading here.”
He turned back to the couch to get his book, which Wendy recognized as a siddur.
Then, starting to walk to the bathroom, she saw her table, which she hadn’t noticed until now. Usually piled with books and papers, it presently held a white tablecloth embroidered with delicate spring flowers, a vase filled with bursting nasturtiums, and place settings for two. The settings were not the dishes Wendy had in her apartment. He must have purchased them specially for Passover.
She didn’t know what to say. She’d expected some take-out food, eaten on paper plates. She hadn’t imagined that he would make this elaborate effort.
“Uri, it’s beautiful. I . . . I’m touched. You must have been working all day.”
“Well,” he said happily, “I’m pleased you like it. I was waiting for you to notice.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t see it at first. It’s . . . remarkable. This apartment has never looked so good.”
As she looked around, she saw that the soft glow wasn’t only from the reading lamp over the couch, but from the Shabbat candles that he had lit. She didn’t recognize the candlesticks—he must have brought them also. Uri had lit them on the counter built between the kitchen and dining room/living room, where Wendy often ate sitting on a stool.
“You lit candles. Can men do that? Isn’t it gender-bending or something?” she asked, perplexed.
“It’s a symbol of home. If a man lives alone, he should light for his household.”
“You light candles every week?”
“At home. If I’m elsewhere, I let the woman of the house do it on my behalf. You weren’t here, so I took the liberty.”
“Those flowers are gorgeous—was that vase in the apartment?”
“From the florist. Judy told me where to go, and when I told her Judy referred me, she threw it in for free.”
“Protectzia.”
He laughed. “You’re getting the Israeli way. Go shower and then we’ll eat. I’m glad you appreciate everything.”
She planted another kiss on his lips, assuming that he wouldn’t mind any residual sour taste on her lips. She said, “You made this homecoming so special, Uri,” and dashed off down the hall to shower and change. She saw that he had left the bathroom lights on but not the bedroom lights, so she opened the bathroom door, as well as the adjacent bedroom one, to find the outfit she wanted in her closet, instead of disturbing the Sabbath harmony, as she normally would, by flicking the light switch. She set her backpack down next to her laundry hamper and removed her toiletry kit. This was pretty much the only thing in the bag that didn’t need laundering because it smelled of smoke from being worn in a bar, or of sunblock or sand.
In the shower, she tingled. Would he be touching her in the places she was cleaning? Unlike the uncertainty about her life course she experienced discussing her future with Orly on the beach, the uncertainty of the evening had a flirtatious and exciting instability about it. There was a connection between the uncertainty of what would happen and the palpable excitement she felt after Uri’s initial kiss. She thought, If I only had the sense, as I do now, that something good will come eventually, I could live with uncertainty of the rest of my life.
As she got out of the shower and dressed, she heard Uri’s strong and sweet tenor voice singing. Uri was chanting the Song of Songs, read by Ashkenazic Jews in the morning of the intermediate Sabbath of Passover. He had been asked to read from it tomorrow morning at the Spicehandlers’ synagogue in Yemin Moshe and was practicing. She was reminded of the voice she had heard her first Shabbat in Jerusalem at Shir Tzion, with its melodic cadences and confident harmony. She decided, humming along, that Uri’s was the most beautiful voice she knew; she would listen as long as she could.
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