by Rina Frank
He called two hours later to ask if he could come home, and she said he couldn’t.
“Would you like me to come back in the evening?” he asked.
“Don’t you want to go to that Adi of yours? That one you’re so in love with?”
“I want to come home,” he said.
“You can come home only after you tell me that you’re through with her,” she replied.
“So can I come home now?” he asked.
“Why, are you finished with her?”
“Yes,” he replied.
“So come back in the evening,” she said to him.
When he came home in the evening, she asked him what he wanted to do, and he said he didn’t know. He was too confused to think what was best for him.
“Maybe we should have a trial separation,” she said, and he agreed.
“Tomorrow I’ll look for somewhere to live,” he said.
All night they heard each other twisting, each alone in bed, she with her humiliation and he with his confusion. She felt all alone in the world, that there was no one there for her, and each time she closed her eyes, she saw the hotel exploding into tiny pieces that can never be put together.
In the afternoon, he called her from work and told her that he’d found a room in an apartment owned by some old woman and that he’d come by later to pick up some of his things.
By the time she’d hung up she was so agitated that she called up his work and asked for Adi. “Just a moment,” said the secretary, and someone picked up the phone. “Hello.”
“Is this Adi?” she asked.
“Yes,” Adi replied.
“Are you the same Adi that’s been fucking my husband?” she asked.
There was silence on the other end of the line.
“I’m asking because I want to make sure I’m talking to the right Adi,” she said, and added, “Just in case there’s more than one Adi in your office.”
“There’s only one,” Adi replied.
“So you just get your filthy hands off my husband, you fucking little whore,” she said, and slammed down the receiver.
In the evening when he came to collect his things, she didn’t speak to him, and didn’t even reply when he asked when he could come to be with Noa.
When she arrived at the bank the following day, she said to Kobi, one of her regular clients who was always sniffing around her, that she didn’t feel up to staying at work today.
“So come away with me,” he suggested immediately.
“Where to?” she asked.
“I need to fly to Eilat to oversee my workers, who are laying wall-to-wall carpeting on an entire floor of the King Solomon Hotel,” he said. “Would you like to come?”
“Why not?” she said, and went to her boss and told him she couldn’t face working today because she’d just learned that her husband was having an affair with another woman.
“You’ve only just found out?” he asked nosily.
“Day before yesterday,” she said and went out, with Kobi right behind her. Within two hours they had taken over an entire floor of the King Solomon Hotel, and for the first time in seven years she had sex with another man who knew what women want and made her feel like one.
Only when she returned from Eilat did she phone her sister to tell her that her husband had left home.
“How dare he do this to me?” she asked her sister, who said that maybe he was getting elsewhere what he was missing at home.
“The worst of it all is that he lied to me,” she said to her sister. “It’s so humiliating to be lied to.” Her sister asked if that really was the thing that hurt her the most.
“Yes, what do you mean?”
“I don’t know what I mean. I am only saying that you should do some genuine emotional stocktaking with regard to what you want of yourself, of your life.”
All night she thought over what her sister had said, and came to the conclusion that she’d been lying to herself, and her greatest pain was caused by the fact that he had stopped loving her. And then she asked herself if she still loved him at all.
“Let’s go for counseling,” she suggested two weeks later, when he came to be with Noa. He looked very sad, and her heart ached to see him so. She wanted to ask him if he was eating well, but of course she didn’t. He agreed immediately, and they went to a highly recommended marriage guidance counselor, to whom she poured her heart out about his infidelity and the fact that when she was taking her daughter to the hospital, he was spending time with his mistress.
“I can never forgive him for that,” she told the counselor.
The counselor told them that since couples usually go for counseling at the very last minute, in most cases she was unable to repair crises that had lasted for years.
The counselor asked him if he was still meeting the other woman, and he said he wasn’t.
But she said that even if they were no longer together, they were still meeting every day at work, and it was driving her crazy.
“Can’t you give up that job?” the counselor asked him.
“Absolutely not. Not after I’ve finally managed to find a job that I feel will advance me professionally. I don’t want to leave this office.”
“So maybe you can tell her to leave?” she hissed. “She’s single, isn’t she? She doesn’t have a family to support. Tell her to leave,” she said to her husband.
“I can’t do that,” he said.
“Why not?” asked the counselor. “It’s quite obvious that the fact of your still meeting her every day at work doesn’t help the way your wife feels.”
“I can see that,” he said, “but still, I can’t ask her to leave her job because my wife is bothered by her being with me in the same office.”
“So you leave, if you are unable to tell her!” she screamed at him in front of the counselor, who told her that she wasn’t even trying to see his point of view but was obsessed with proving how wrong he was, compared with her. “You have to understand the underlying problem,” she told her, and she replied that the underlying problem was that he was in love with another woman.
“That counselor gets on my nerves,” she told him when they went out. “I’m not going back to her.” He refused to talk to his Adi about leaving her job, and she called his sister to ask her to try to persuade him to leave his job. She grasped at this as if her entire marriage depended only on whether he met his ex-girlfriend in the office they both worked in. His sister told her that she couldn’t dictate to her brother what to do with his life.
When his father told her that as a woman she should be fighting for her man, she felt she had been struck by a bolt of lightning. Did she really want to fight for him at all? After all, she’d used up all the strength she had on her struggle for Noa. She started imagining how her life would look without him, and although she still saw the hotel exploding into tiny pieces like in the movie, she asked herself if it wouldn’t be easier to build a new hotel than to try to rehabilitate the ruins of the old one that were spread all over town.
She went through the next three months in a daze, wandering from one friend to another, telling them all about the breakdown of her marriage, hoping they would rebuke him for his behavior. But most of her friends said they’d always seen him as an affectionate, loving husband, and things like that happen all the time and there are always temptations in work situations and you don’t get divorced because of an infidelity, and even if she said it wasn’t only sex but love, they said they were sure he was in love with her; didn’t he bring her flowers every Friday?
She felt as if the whole world was against her, and even her mother, when she tried talking to her, to get some emotional support from her, told her that she was naive if she thought she’d find anything better than him, and with all of Noa’s problems, she couldn’t afford to even think that she’d ever find a better father for her daughter.
“But he doesn’t love me,” she tried to tell her mother, who immediately dismissed the whole thing. She kn
ew that the three months she had allocated them to decide what they wanted to do about their marriage were fast running out, and she was still trying to get everyone she knew to agree that he was a shit. But wherever she turned, people were telling her she should forgive him and that you don’t throw out a husband after seven years of marriage because of one time he’s played away from home.
One day she saw Noa dancing in her room, as if she was putting all her heart and soul in her dance, as if she was floating on air, looking into herself and inventing a whole new world all her own, and her heart ached at the thought that, from the moment of her birth, life had never smiled on Noa, and now that she was four years old, her father had left home—perhaps forever, perhaps for an indefinite time—and her mother was going around like a weapon of mass destruction with anger attacks she couldn’t control.
One afternoon they were on their way to the Institute of Child Development when they almost collided with a car coming out of a side street without giving her the right-of-way. She pushed down hard on the brakes, looked at the backseat to make sure that Noa was safely belted into her child seat, stopped the car in the middle of the road, got out, and walked over to the murderous driver who could have killed her daughter and gave her two loud slaps across the face before returning to her car and driving off, so as not to be late for her appointment.
A week later, when her husband came home to be with Noa, she went out to take care of some chores and wanted to park in the Ramat Aviv commercial center parking lot just as some slimy yuppie with the elaborate grammar of a schoolteacher—just her type—shouted at her that she had almost driven into his car. “Why almost?” she asked and backed up, then drove straight into him. This time she managed to knock a dent not only in his fender but in her own monthly salary as well. She thought it could have been worse, and that she and Noa could eat at her sister’s for the rest of the month, which would please her sister.
But after the incident in the playground, she knew she had lost it completely.
They went to the playground near their home, and when she wanted to sit Noa on the merry-go-round next to a kid her age, the kid’s mother, who herself looked like a Ms. Potato Head, came running up and snatched him off, looking sideways at Noa, whose face was swollen from the steroids she had to take to stabilize her hemoglobin.
“That thing your daughter has, it’s not contagious, is it? Can my little boy catch it?” she asked reproachfully.
“Tell me, do you think that stupidity is contagious? And wickedness and ignorance and nastiness?” she asked in return.
Ms. Potato Head said nothing.
“Answer me!” she screamed at the woman suddenly.
“No?” the woman said tentatively.
“Actually, I think it is,” she surprised the woman, “which is why I am taking my daughter away from here before she becomes infected by some of your evil.”
Ms. Potato Head sat in embarrassed silence, while she was beginning to really enjoy abusing her, asking if she knew the difference between stupidity and genius.
“No,” the woman replied, thinking she’d changed the subject.
“No, well, the thing is, genius has its limits. Good-bye and good riddance to you, stupid woman,” she said, and carried her daughter off, holding her in her arms as if to protect her against all evil all the way back home.
She filled the bath and put Noa and some plastic ducks into the water and scrubbed away all the nastiness from the playground, and when Noa asked her why she was crying all the time, she said she wasn’t crying, it was only the bath making her eyes wet.
Noa looked at her with compassion in her eyes, and she thought to herself that God had given the world ten measures of compassion, and her daughter had taken nine of them for herself. And only one measure remained for all those other billions of people who inhabit the earth’s surface. Anyway, who says that life’s fair, when Noa had taken all that compassion and left so little for everyone else?
The next day was a Friday, and Friday evening is a time when God is not kind to the lonely. She was alone in her home, all alone with her depression, since her husband had taken Noa with him to spend the weekend with his sister in Jerusalem. She turned on the faucet and filled the bath to its very limit and climbed in, submerging her head in the warm water. And once again, as she had the week Noa was born, she tested her body’s ability to survive without air; and she was emotionally prepared to sink down into the waters of salvation, when the phone rang. She ignored the phone at first and tried to reinstate in herself the concentration a person needs in order to die. But the phone continued to ring and ring, aggressively, relentlessly. After counting the twentieth ring, she pulled herself out of the bath, promising the water that she’d be back directly; she wrapped herself in a towel and picked up the phone.
“Where are you?” her sister asked her.
“At home,” she replied.
“No, you’re not at home,” said her sister.
“According to what?” she said impatiently, thinking about the warm water awaiting her.
“According to the fact that all the lights are off in your house,” her sister replied. “Eight o’clock on a Friday evening, you’re sitting alone in a silent house, not even watching the news.” Her sister knew that she liked to watch the Friday evening news, thus making up for a whole week’s worth in one go. Who needs to hear all those awful stories every day, anyway? As if life was not hard enough without news items tapping away at your soul every hour, with an added news flash every half hour.
“What’s there to see?” she asked her exasperating sister, who was disturbing her plans to die.
“Quite honestly, nothing,” her sister replied. “So where are you?”
“In the bathroom,” she said. “I’m taking a shower.”
“In that case, you are spending too much time in there,” her sister said.
“How do you know? Are you watching me?” she asked, turning it into a joke.
“Yes,” her sister replied simply.
“How are you watching me?” She was curious to know.
“Through Shlomo’s army binoculars,” her sister told her.
“Have you been spending all your time watching me through Shlomo’s binoculars?” she asked, horrified at this violation of her privacy. Could her sister, who lived right opposite her, across the boulevard, have been using her husband’s military binoculars to follow her every movement throughout the nearly two years she had been living there?
“Only since you split up,” said her older sister.
“Why are you spying on me?” She was riled.
“I’ve been worried about you,” her sister said. “I’ve been terribly worried about you. I was afraid that one day you’d lose it completely and suddenly decide to jump out of your eighth-floor window.”
“Even if I had wanted to jump, you wouldn’t have been able to stop me with your army binoculars,” she said to her sister, testing her as usual.
“I would have called you immediately to distract you,” said her sister, who was wise and thought of every single thing, with the resourcefulness she had inherited from their mother. “Besides,” she added, “what are you taking so many baths for?”
“Maybe my conscience isn’t clean?” she replied.
“Your conscience is pristine. Come over to my place,” she said, laying down the law. “I’ll cook you the things you love best.”
“What do I love best?” she asked, still ruminating over whether she wouldn’t prefer to return to the warm bath, which had probably gone cold by now.
“Artichoke with butter,” her sister replied.
“I don’t want it with butter,” she bantered, as if they were still little girls and not young mothers. “Make me some mustard and mayo sauce.”
“It doesn’t taste as good,” said her sister.
“I prefer my artichoke with mustard and mayo,” she insisted, angry that her sister always tried to decide for her what tasted better, forgetting complete
ly that only seven minutes ago she had contemplated sinking under the water.
“Come on, nuisance,” said her sister.
She went back to the bathroom, pulled the plug out of the bath, and watched for a few seconds as the water swirled its way to the sea. She didn’t even bother rinsing herself off. She had a clean conscience, and with it, she got dressed and went across to her sister, who would enfold her in her concern.
On Sunday she took Noa to the hospital to have her hearing tested; it appeared that Noa had lost her hearing completely in one ear and would need a hearing aid in her other ear.
She broke down. All the way home she wept like someone demented, and when Noa’s caretaker arrived, she called her husband’s office and asked for Adi.
“She’s not in,” the secretary told her.
“Is she no longer working there?” she asked the secretary.
“Of course she is. But today is her day off,” she added.
“Can I have her address, please?” she asked politely. “I am calling from the courier service; I have a parcel here that needs to be delivered to her address.”
The generous secretary supplied her with Adi’s address, and she made her way straight there, taking with her all her pain and frustration from Noa’s audio test.
She rang the bell, and a chubby young woman opened the door. She was quite surprised to see the fatso who had ruined her family.
“Adi?” she asked her.
“Adi,” Fatso called out, “someone here for you.”
Adi emerged from a room and approached her roommate, who remained standing in the doorway.
She stuck her foot in the door. Adi walked toward the door and stood next to Fatso. She was taller than her and appeared quite strong.
“Are you Adi?” she asked, keeping her foot in the door to prevent anyone from trying to slam it in her face.
“I am,” she replied.
“Are you the person who fucks around with people you work with?” she asked. She didn’t, of course, wish to give her the honor of admitting that it had been a love affair, and before the girl had had a chance to reply, she gave her two powerful slaps, one to the right cheek with her right hand, followed immediately with another to the left cheek with her left hand.