Housebroken

by Yael Hedaya

  Then she made herself a cup of coffee and looked for something to eat. In the fridge she found a pot with leftover rice and two meatballs. She put the pot on the stove and lit the flame, but suddenly she was too hungry to wait. She took the cold food off the stove, put it on the table, and sat down to eat.

  The man told her about the meals. Whenever she asked him how things were going with the woman, if he didn’t regret moving in with her, if he thought their relationship had a future, what he felt about her, he would tell her about some meal the woman had cooked, as if this was the answer to all her questions. He never told her about their sex life.

  Afterward they had invited her to their dinner party, and she had tasted the woman’s cooking herself, but she was so drunk that the next day, when she sat at home and tried to reconstruct the menu, she couldn’t remember it. All she could remember was the taste of the single man’s rejection. She remembered how she had fawned on him in the car, and she remembered herself writing down her phone number for him before the three of them dropped her off in front of her house.

  She ate the cold rice and meatballs greedily, scraped the leftovers from the bottom of the pot with a fork, and gathered up bits of rice with her fingers. The dog, whose hope was still automatically aroused by the sound of food, got off the sofa and presented himself shyly in the kitchen. The friend looked at his bowl. It was empty. She studied the list again, to see when she was supposed to feed him. The woman had written eight o’clock, and it was already after nine. The dog sniffed the air. The friend stood up, held the pot close to his nose, and then put it in the sink. She glanced at the bagful of dog food standing on the fridge, a new bag which the man and the woman had bought before they left to save her the trouble. The note assured her that it would be enough to last all week. She took it down and stood it on the table, and the dog began to wag his tail. She picked up his bowl and put it on the table next to the bag. They could have cleared a shelf for her. They could have filled his bowl before they left, but no. They left it up to her.

  She found a pair of scissors in a drawer, and was about to open the bag, but suddenly she changed her mind and returned the scissors to the drawer. She lifted the heavy bag and put it back on top of the fridge. She put the empty bowl down on the floor, and when the dog approached it and stopped next to it, stared at it, and then looked at her inquiringly, she stuck out her tongue at him.

  She went into the living room and flopped onto the sofa. She picked up the newspaper which was lying on the table, and when she began to read it she noticed a stain of tomato sauce on the collar of the white T-shirt. She sprang up and ran into the bathroom, took off the shirt, put it in the sink, and rubbed the stain with soap. She stood there for a long time, rubbing the material between her fingers, afraid to lift the shirt out of the water and foam in order to see if the stain was gone.

  The dog walked down the hall and stopped to look at her. Then he went up to his rug, lay down on it, curled up into a little ball, and closed his eyes. The friend took the wet T-shirt out of the sink and held it up to the light, but there was no need for light to see that the stain was still there. It had spread and changed its shape, from a little spot surrounded by splatters into a huge amoeba dividing and multiplying itself in the fabric. She rushed around the apartment looking for bleach. She looked under the kitchen sink, in the cupboards, on the kitchen porch, in the bathroom, and even in the bedroom closet, but she couldn’t find any. She threw the wet shirt into the bathtub and hurried to the living room to look for a pen and paper. She found a notebook on the woman’s desk, tore a page out of it, and wrote a memo to herself, in big letters: “Buy bleach!” She put her frantic note on the kitchen table, next to the woman’s calm note.

  In the morning, after sleeping in the man’s and the woman’s bed, she went into the kitchen and found the dog dozing next to his empty bowl, his head on his paws. Then she saw her note, made herself coffee, drank it quickly, and washed the cup and the pot and fork standing in the sink. She got dressed, went down to the grocery, bought two bottles of bleach, milk, beer, and rice, and went back upstairs. She crammed the shirt, which had begun to smell bad, into the pail she found on the kitchen porch, and poured in the two bottles of bleach. She heard the phone ring and the answering machine saying: “We’re not at home. Leave a message and we’ll get back to you,” and then the beep, and someone leaving a message: “Where are you? What’s happening? How are you? Call us.”

  She gave the dog water, but his bowl remained empty. She didn’t want to kill him. She wanted to see him suffer. After she hadn’t taken him out for three days the dog peed and shat on the bathroom floor, next to the pail which gave off a terrible stink.

  Most of the time he lay on his rug in the hallway and slept. From time to time he got up and walked slowly to the kitchen, his tail between his legs, his pelvis lowered, as if he couldn’t make up his mind whether to sit or stand. He stood for a long time at the kitchen door, in this new posture, looking like a big, old rabbit. He looked at his bowl from a distance, too hungry to beg, too well trained to try to snatch something from the hands of the friend, who greedily devoured everything in the fridge.

  It was a week of heat wave and the apartment blazed. Every day the dog drank his water, and at night, when the friend went out and left him alone in the house, he went to the bathroom, squatted next to the pail, and peed. During the day she closed the shutters and lay on the sofa in her bra and panties, and in the evenings she went out. She came back very late, long after midnight, and took off her clothes on the way to the bathroom where, ignoring the sharp smell of the bleach and the urine, the puddle on the floor, and the rotting T-shirt in the pail, she took a cold shower. Then she wrapped herself in a towel, opened the shutters and the windows in the bedroom, and lay down on the bed. She wondered what the weather was like in Paris.

  And she wondered how she would celebrate her thirty-fourth birthday in three months’ time. For five years she had celebrated her birthdays with the man, who always brought her some silly present—kitschy earrings, heart-shaped soaps, dolls. On his birthdays she gave surprise parties for him in her apartment. In three months’ time he too would be thirty-four, she thought. All these years she had seen the fact that she and the man had been born in the same year, one week apart, as another sign that they were meant for each other. There were a lot of other signs she invented, but the birthdays were the main thing.

  Two weeks before he had met the woman he had celebrated his birthday. He was depressed, he said, he was already thirty-three and still alone. She had made a party for him on her porch. It was a pleasant summer evening, not hot and stifling like this one, and you could breathe. She had invited all his friends, everyone she had invited in previous years, and made sure to tell the couple with the baby a few of weeks in advance so they could find a baby-sitter. Nevertheless they turned up with the baby, who was six months old and turned into the attraction of the evening. The man played with her, held her in his arms, and hugged and kissed her, and after he had blown out the candles on his cake with her help, he took her to the bedroom and changed her diaper, on the bed, as if she were his baby.

  The friend had bought him a pair of black jeans, which she knew he liked, and after the guests left and the man remained sitting in his armchair on the porch she said to him: “Try them on.” He went into the bedroom, took off his pants, and came out to the porch wearing the new jeans, which were tight. “Never mind,” he said. “I’ll wear them a bit and they’ll stretch.” But he never wore them. Afterward he returned to the bedroom and got undressed, taking off his shirt and underwear as well as the new jeans, lay on his back on the mattress, and called her to come to bed.

  She quickly cleared away the empty bottles and the ashtrays and the paper plates with the remains of the expensive cake she had bought, the beautiful, multilayered cake, which didn’t taste as good as it looked, and she collected the thirty-four little pink candles, which the baby had pulled out of the cake and scattered all over the
house, and then she hurried to the bedroom. The man made love to her, kissed her on the cheek, and thanked her for the party and the present and going to all that trouble, and then turned his back to her and fell asleep. Now, as she lay in the middle of the man’s bed, she couldn’t remember what had made her think those days had been happy.

  She fell asleep crying into the pillow. In the house the air stood still, hot, and heavy, full of the dreams she dreamed in her sleep—in which she saw herself as a big gray pigeon gathering crumbs in a rainy European square—and the waking nightmares of the hungry dog.

  On the morning of the fourth day the friend hurried to the butcher’s and bought a pound of fresh meat. She ran home, sweating in the heat, and filled the red plastic bowl. She sat at the kitchen table—the woman’s note was still there, stained with coffee and tomato sauce—and looked at the dog. He stood next to his bowl and stared. His legs trembled and she thought that perhaps it was too late, perhaps he was already too weak, perhaps he was dying, perhaps he had forgotten how to eat.

  She encouraged him with kind words, urged him to eat, she pleaded, but the dog went on standing next to the bowlful of meat, the trembling spreading from his legs to his back, his tail hanging between his legs, making weak whimpering sounds.

  Suddenly he began to howl. It was a long jackal howl which split the air and caused the shutters in the opposite building to open. He stood with his back to her, his head raised to the ceiling, his eyes closed, and his howls tore the silence of the hot, dry morning.

  She pressed both hands against her ears and began to cry. I’ve killed him, she thought, and tried to think of what she would say to the man and the woman when they returned, in three days’ time, refreshed and in love, looking for their dog. What would she do with his corpse? But suddenly the dog fell silent. He turned his head to her and she smiled at him and whispered: “Eat.” He circled the bowl, sniffed it, looked at her again, then picked up a piece of meat daintily between his teeth, and ran to his rug. He ran like this, back and forth between the rug and the kitchen, until the bowl was empty, and a pile of red meat rose on the mat. The dog lay next to it, his head resting on his paws. He pulled one piece after the other into his mouth and chewed the meat slowly, as if the act of eating hurt, and his face was twisted in a strange, crooked smile.

  28

  In Paris the woman was the man’s translator. He didn’t understand a word of French, and the woman, who spoke French fluently, was happy to be his teacher, his interpreter, ordering for him in restaurants, consulting the waiters on his behalf, chatting with strangers in the street, asking them for directions. In the mornings she would slip out of their hotel and return with big breakfasts. They ate sitting on the bed, and the woman told him enthusiastically about the adventures she had had on the way. Everything was an adventure for her that week. The whole week it didn’t stop raining.

  She made friends immediately, with the unfriendly shop assistants and the old neighborhood barber, to whom she entrusted her hair one morning on the way back from the delicatessen. When she returned to the room she jumped onto the bed and tossed her cropped head in the man’s face, splashing him with cold raindrops.

  For a week she dragged him through the streets, his hand clutched in hers, and he tried to keep up with her, holding over their heads the big umbrella they had bought at the airport. She was full of joy and he had never seen her like this. At home, even when she was in a good mood, there was always a cloud of unhappiness floating above her head, liable to burst at any moment and shower them both with tears. He liked that cloud. He liked the tears. He didn’t like seeing the woman unhappy, but he liked the permanent presence of her tears, the fact that it was easy for him to make her cry. Here in rain-swept Paris the cloud had vanished. Now and then he tried to see whether it still existed, sticking imaginary pins into it, provoking, sulking, but nothing happened. The cloud and the woman he knew had stayed at home, and he ran after this strange woman in the street.

  In the plane on the way back she told him that she loved him. All the way they had been silent, he sullen, she pensive. A little while before landing she took his hand in hers, turned her face to the window and looked at the white floor of clouds and the wing of the plane gliding above them, looked back at him, and said: “I love you.”

  He thought that he was going to cry. He wanted to cry out of relief, because he believed her, and he wanted to cry because he was afraid that she was lying, but mainly he wanted to cry because he had never felt so lonely as during the past week. He fastened his seat belt and then fastened hers and said nothing. He put his hand back in hers, which had remained waiting in her lap. He waited for her to ask if he loved her too, but the woman looked out of the window. He waited for her to ask at least why he hadn’t responded to her sudden declaration of love, but the woman pulled him toward her and said: “Look! Land!” And like a little girl she was filled with excitement in anticipation of the landing.

  They arrived home in the middle of a scorching day and found the shutters closed and the dog sleeping in the hallway on his rug. He heard their footsteps on the landing and their voices and the key turning in the lock, but he remained slumped on his side, one ear cocked and listening. They came up to him, surprised and concerned, and bent down to stroke him. He raised his head and looked at them, and then lowered it to the rug again and stared at the wall.

  The house was tidy, and there was a smell of cleaning products in the air. On the kitchen table there was a bunch of flowers in a glass jar. The dog’s bowl was full. On the table was a note addressed to them both. “Welcome home,” it said, with a row of exclamation marks. “I hope you had fun. Everything here was more or less as usual, except for one little accident: I ruined a white T-shirt of yours. I’ll buy you a new one. I bought some food and cleaned up a bit. We’ll talk later. Hope you had a good flight. We missed you.”

  There were eighteen messages on the answering machine. Seven for the man, five for the woman, and six for both of them. They sat in the living room, their suitcases still in the hall, and listened to the messages. Then the woman went to shower and the man made iced coffee. They drank it in silence, smoking, parting from their vacation. In the afternoon they wandered around the dim apartment, careful not to bump into each other or to step on the dog, who remained motionless on his rug. When evening fell the woman opened the shutters and the windows and went into the bedroom to unpack. The man whistled to the dog.

  They went to the beach, because the man thought there would be a breeze there, and sat on the sand looking at the last bathers coming out of the water, drying themselves with their towels. Most people on the beach were elderly, a few families with children, and a few youngsters hanging around doing nothing. There were a few dogs too, rushing around and barking and dashing into the sea and running back to the shore, shaking off the water.

  You couldn’t really call what had happened in Paris a crisis, thought the man. A crisis was something that was easier to deal with, defined, known, but what had happened in Paris was worse than a crisis: for the first time in his life, thought the man, he was afraid of being alone. He remembered sitting naked on the bed and waiting for the woman in that depressing hotel. He remembered the rain pouring down outside, the dirty brown color of the curtains, and someone shouting something down below, in the street, in the foreign language he had come to hate.

  He had paced restlessly up and down the room, from the window to the bed and back to the window again, parting the curtains and looking down to see if the woman was coming. In his boredom he began to pick things up from the floor—her stockings, her bra, panties, hairpins he found scattered all over, not knowing if they were hers or if they belonged to some other woman who had been in the room before them. The hairpins annoyed him. He picked them all up, crawling over the carpet and examining it thoroughly, which kept him occupied for fifteen minutes, and then he put the handful of pins on the little table next to the woman’s side of the bed.

  He wasn’t hungry, but he
wanted his breakfast. He lay in bed and smoked and waited for her. He suddenly heard the sound of a woman laughing and the tapping of heels running up the stairs, and he stiffened and pulled up the blanket, ready to scold her as soon as she burst into the room, but it wasn’t her. He heard a man’s voice climbing up the stairs after the woman and continuing up the next flight to the floor above. It was another woman. With another man. Not his woman, who had disappeared without even leaving a note.

  It never occurred to him that something might have happened to her. It was clear that her disappearance was deliberate, aimed against him, and even though it was only eleven o’clock it seemed to him that he hadn’t seen the woman for hours, even days, that she had vanished long ago.

  This was the first time in his life that he was afraid of being alone. This was the first time in his life that he took off his watch and held it in front of his eyes and watched the minutes passing. It was humiliating, but it distracted him from his thoughts and kept him busy for an hour, and when he suddenly heard her running up the stairs, and this time it was definitely his woman, he quickly put the watch down on his bedside table, and leaned back against the pillows.

  A strange woman entered the room. It wasn’t the hair that made her so strange—now, on the hot beach with the quiet dog at his side, he had to admit that the new haircut suited her—it was a jigsaw puzzle of female parts, all of which he knew, but whose composition made up a different picture, not the familiar picture that was born in their kitchen, but the picture of a beautiful woman in a foreign magazine.

  “Where were you?” he asked, and now too, on the beach, he heard his hoarse voice in that room in France.

  “Where were you?” he asked again, and his eye, which had become addicted to the watch hands moving, glanced at it quickly on the bedside table, as if another whole hour had passed between her entering the room and him repeating his question for the third time in the same two minutes: “Where the hell were you?”