Housebroken

by Yael Hedaya

  But he was silent. I stood in front of him with my hand stretched out, and I suddenly no longer saw myself as someone waiting for an answer but as a beggar.

  “Look,” I said, “the way I see it, you’re having two affairs. One with me and one with Sigal. It makes no difference to me that you’ve known her for five years and me only six months. I don’t think that means anything. It’s a lame excuse. And you should know that I often thought of telling her. But don’t worry,” I said, when I saw him raising his eyes for a second and looking at me and dropping them to the floor again, “you don’t have to worry, because I won’t. But you should know that sometimes, on Fridays, I go past your street in the afternoons.”

  “What for?”

  “I just drive past, and sometimes I see her getting off the bus, with those flowers she always brings you. And there are times when I want to get out of the car and run and catch her before she goes upstairs. And I feel like telling her that there’s something she should know. That I’m not a friend of yours, like you said when you introduced me. Or maybe I am? Do you see me as a friend?”

  “No,” he mumbled.

  “And I feel like telling her that I’m your girlfriend.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “What’s not true, Nathan?”

  But he was silent.

  “Why won’t you talk to me?” I said. “Why? Just tell me how you feel.”

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “How do you feel about me? Tell me.”

  But he only took a deep breath again, and blew it out.

  “Because I love you. That’s how I feel. As much as we pretend that it’s just sex, that’s not the way it is. I love you.”

  “Stop it,” he said.

  “Stop what?” I said. “What were you thinking all these months? That I don’t feel anything for you? Is that what you thought?”

  He said, “No.” He said it quietly. He spoke to the floor: “That’s not what I thought.”

  “So tell me what you did think—that it could go on like this forever? That it would go on until you made up your mind? It’s pretty clear that you love Sigal. It’s clear that you’re going to marry her.”

  “Stop it,” he said again.

  “And if that’s what’s going to happen, and I’m pretty sure it is, if not now then in a year or two—then I should know where I stand. If it’s true, then I should know. And if it isn’t true, if Sigal is just someone else you’re fucking, then I want to know that too. Because I can’t go on like this, because with every day that passes I fall more in love with you. And I hate you too. And I can’t go on, I can’t, because in the end I’ll hate myself.”

  But he shook his head from side to side. He rested his arms on his knees and leaned forward, and shook his head from side to side, and took those deep breaths.

  “Nathan,” I said. “I know that it sounds like a terrible cliché, but what it comes down to is that it’s either me or Sigal.”

  He didn’t answer. I took two steps toward the sofa. I could already smell him from where I was standing, from where I was standing and saying, “Make up your mind,” from where I was shouting, “Now. Make up your mind now.” And I took another step, until there were only two tiles separating us, and my body wanted to collapse and fall onto Nathan and say: “Don’t decide,” and a strange tremor crept up my back and stopped at my shoulders, and then my hands came up and set themselves on my hips and I yelled: “Decide!”

  He had a tortured look in his eyes when he finally raised his head. I don’t know how long it took until it happened and how many more times I said “Decide,” but he had a tortured look in his eyes, and this gave me hope. He looked at me without saying a word, he looked at me with those suffering blue eyes, and the more I looked into them the more I understood that it wasn’t pain in his eyes but panic, plain and simple panic. And afterward he dropped his head again and stared at the floor tiles, and it seemed to me that I heard him mumble something. It seemed to me that he mumbled to the floor tiles: “I can’t decide.”

  “You can’t decide?” I said. “Is that what you just said?”

  He nodded.

  “Do you want to think about it?” I asked. “You want to think about it for a few days and talk to Sigal?”

  He shook his head.

  “So what do you want?” I asked. “You want to go on like this? You want to go on being with both of us?”

  He nodded again, but this time heavily, doubtfully, and my hands gripped my hips, and I took another step toward the sofa and I could already touch his knee with mine. I could have sat down beside him on the sofa and hugged him and said: “Let’s forget it,” but I stepped back and said: “So let’s break up.”

  He went on nodding heavily, and I went on standing in the middle of the room with my hands on my hips and mumbling: “Let’s break up.” Afterward I went to the toilet. I didn’t need to go, but I hoped that by the time I returned Nathan would have decided that he wanted us to stay together. I sat on the seat and felt a huge lump of tears forming in my chest. I sat on the toilet without pulling my pants down, and when it seemed to me that enough time had passed, I flushed the water and returned to the living room. Nathan was standing on the balcony, leaning on the rail, and looking down. I stood next to him and stroked his back. I touched the down on the small of his back. It was wet with sweat.

  I asked if I should cut up the watermelon. He nodded. I went into the kitchen, took the watermelon out of the fridge, split it in half, cut one half into cubes and put them on a plate, and stuck two forks into the two top pieces. I tasted a little piece that fell onto the marble counter. It was sweet. It was the sweetest watermelon I’d ever tasted in my life.

  I went out to the balcony and put the plate down between us, and we both ate in silence, watching the street. Even though it was the sweetest watermelon I’d ever tasted in my life, I couldn’t enjoy it because of the lump in my throat mingling with the sweetness, and because I knew that it was the end and we wouldn’t see each other again. Nathan ate heartily. He was relieved he could eat a watermelon and didn’t have to talk. He stuck the fork into the big cubes and crammed them one after another into his mouth, and the juice trickled down his chin, and he suddenly began talking to me about some tree that I’d never noticed before.

  It was an old palm tree in the yard across my building, with bunches of dry dates hanging from its fronds. He pointed at the tree with his fork and said that someone should pick the dates, because they were suffocating the tree, and if the dates weren’t picked the tree would die.

  The plate was empty, and I asked if I should cut some more and he said no, he had eaten too much. He said he thought he should go. I said okay, and walked him to the door. I heard him going down the stairs and the entrance door slamming. I went into the kitchen and wrapped the second half of the watermelon in Saran Wrap and put it back in the fridge. Then I went out to the balcony and hundreds of black birds suddenly landed on the tree. Within a few minutes they had polished off the dates. I was sorry Nathan hadn’t seen it and I realized I would never see him again.

  I went inside and closed the blinds and the balcony door and lay on my stomach on the sofa and the lump of tears burst and it was a great relief. All kinds of sobbing sounds came out of my mouth, and there was a mixture of sugar and salt on my tongue.

  The phone rang. I didn’t pick it up. For a moment I hoped it was Nathan calling from the pay phone around the corner to tell me he had decided. I let the answering machine take the call and raised myself on my elbows to hear if it really was Nathan calling to say he had decided and was on his way back. I counted four rings and waited for the click and afterward the silence and afterward the beep and for a second I was full of joyful expectation and I sniffed. After the long beep I heard my mother’s voice. She said: “Maya? It’s Mom. Dad and I want you to come for lunch on Saturday, if you’re not busy.” She was silent for a moment and I heard her light a cigarette and blow the smoke into the mouthpiece. Th
en she burst out laughing and said: “Your father is learning to cook.”

  MATTI

  On May fifth, 1990, which was a lovely spring day, a man came in with his wife who complained that he was suffering from headaches. “Terrible ones,” she said and shook her head, “terrible headaches,” as if they were her own, and then she squeezed the hand of the tall shy man who within minutes became our patient.

  We let her describe the symptoms, enriched by metaphors full of distress and imagination, and when she finished, leaning toward us and whispering, “My husband’s not the same person he used to be,” as if he weren’t there, we nodded and asked: “How long has this been going on?” and she said: “About three months.”

  “Since February?”

  “Yes, February,” she said.

  “Pain since February,” we wrote down, and the woman—who rose from her chair to glance at the brand-new medical chart, which might have contained something that cheered her up, with its look of importance, its possibilities, and in the creative freedom the patient was about to ruin for us all—said: “Yes, February. He had a bad case of the flu and then it started,” and we wrote: “After a flu, the patient began to complain of pain.” “A bad flu,” she emphasized, so we wrote: “After a bad case of influenza the patient began to complain of pains.” “Terrible pains!” she insisted and pointed at our pen, so we wrote down “terrible,” too, and the woman put her hand back in her lap and nodded approvingly, as if we had jointly finished composing the first, indifferent sentence of a fairy tale, immediately after which the horrors would begin.

  She quickly picked up the style and began dictating the case history to us, adding to “terrible”—“sharp,” “blinding,” “paralyzing,” “unbearable,” “monstrous,” “inhuman,” “indescribable”—and when she felt that the description of the pain was overshadowing the pain itself, she looked at her husband who was staring at the carpet scratching his head, asking him with her eyes to contribute something, just one word to sum it all up, but the man mumbled: “No.”

  “No?” she asked.

  “Not three months.”

  “Two months, then?” she scolded him. “What difference does it make, Matti, you’ve been in agony for two months now.”

  “Don’t exaggerate,” he said quietly. “I’m not in agony. It hurts a bit, but I’m not in agony.”

  “Oh really?” she said and dropped his hand. “So why are we here? Tell me: why are we here?”

  “Because you wanted us to come,” he said. “You wanted to.”

  We are familiar with this dialogue. The patient and his wife sit here, in a well-lit room with large windows and a comforting view, probably aware of the fact that they’ll look back on this day with hatred, and maybe they’ll long for it, too, because it was the day when, as far as they were concerned, everything was still possible, a different diagnosis, for example. And in the meantime, in order to buy time, they argue about the details: how long and how bad, and why not admit it, and who’s lying, and who’s angrier and who’s more right and who’s more frightened, and who hurts more—this is the ritual.

  “And these pains,” we asked Mr. Rosen in the tone that specialists concoct from even doses of sympathy and impatience, “are they severe?”

  “No,” he said, but Mrs. Rosen immediately corrected him: “Yes!”

  “Any dizziness?” we inquired, and the woman, who knew that he was about to deny the dizziness as well, quickly said: “Yes, put down ‘yes.’” “Nausea?” we asked and jotted down “yes” before the man had time to answer: “No.” “No?” the woman protested. “Did you forget what happened at the Passover Meal?” “That was from the food,” he said. “No it wasn’t,” she said, “we were all fine. And at Lake Kinneret? Don’t you remember what happened at Lake Kinneret?” He kept quiet, remembering what had happened at Lake Kinneret, and we wanted to ask: “What happened at Lake Kinneret?” but we asked if there were any visual disturbances, and he looked at her and nodded, and she took his hand in hers again.

  “A virus, perhaps?” we suggested.

  “Yes, a virus!” Mr. Rosen snatched at the opportunity we gave him to recover, because after all, that too is our role, to give hope, or at least the hope of hope, or at least, not to diagnose death before we are sure.

  But the woman kept shaking her head from side to side in sorrow and disbelief. She had short hair, a metallic gray, a round face and round glasses and thin lips compressed in a nervous smile and the promise of tears that indeed burst out a few weeks later, when we told her that her husband’s condition was hopeless.

  She was very pale when she brought him to us that first time, surrounded by a fidgety aura of anxiety that accompanied her every movement—from the moment she knocked on the door and apologized for disturbing us even though they had an appointment made five weeks in advance, and motioned him with her head to come in, and waited for him to sit down before taking the chair next to him—until the moment she folded the forms for the tests we had ordered—enough to keep them busy for another five weeks—and pushed them into her bag, thanking us as she did so, and all the time shaking her head.

  Birds were chirping outside in the tops of trees planted many years ago on the grounds of our hospital, with little bronze plaques bearing the names of the donors who had made the trees possible and the lawns, the benches, the entrance lobbies, the cafeteria, the elevators, the state-of-the-art operating rooms, the wards, the beds, the tables and chairs and the pajamas and the diagnoses and the windows, and the pen with which we tapped on the chart of Mr. Rosen, who wasn’t interested in the view and whose eyes were fixed on the carpet.

  We looked at the woman who now appeared ten years older than she had the first time, we watched her develop a new kind of loneliness that spread through her body with the lightning speed of a malignant tumor. A loneliness we can easily diagnose, for instance in the way she absentmindedly plays with the paper clip that fell from one of the patients’ files on our desk: she picks it up and opens it and winds it around her finger and turns it back into a paper clip and puts it back where she found it, and suddenly she’s embarrassed because she realizes that it’s no longer usable, that she’s twisted it out of shape, and all the time she’s listening to us with that silent nodding of hers that we were no longer sure if we found touching or irritating.

  And it seems to us that our patient wants to say something as well, and maybe behind our back he steals a glance outside and thinks: What a beautiful view, what a beautiful day, and wonders how many more days like this he will see. But Mr. and Mrs. Rosen were silent and all that could be heard in the room was the unnecessary chirping of the birds and a printer spitting out the results of other patients’ tests.

  “No one ever prepared me for such a thing,” the woman told us on a humid day in June, sobbing into a handful of tissues, when we told them that the tumor was malignant and inoperable. The patient stood up and looked straight at us—this was the first time we noticed the color of his eyes, a bitter green full of life—and said: “That’s impossible,” and to her he said, “I’ll meet you in the cafeteria,” and walked out of the room. And though it was unprofessional of us, we couldn’t help thinking, when we heard his footsteps receding on the linoleum floor, that like the argument over the details, the anger, in Mr. Rosen’s case, was a luxury, too.

  Mrs. Rosen apologized for her husband and burst into tears again. Nobody had prepared her for such a thing, she said, to see him like this. Ill. Dying. Dead and leaving behind two small children. Ill yes, we said, but not dying yet, and certainly not dead, and as for the small children—we put out a hand to touch her fingers but withdrew it at the last minute—yes, this is very sad.

  She already knows what’s going to happen: she’ll fuss around him when he vomits and moans and deteriorates faster than anyone can imagine but also slow enough to drive her out of her mind, and she doesn’t deserve this. Her enemies don’t deserve this. Nobody does. But who are her enemies? And will he be in pain? Yes,
we say, but he’s already in pain, she says, real pain. Yes, we say sympathetically, but it won’t be the same kind.

  And his pillow will be covered with hair that fell out, the black, frizzy, problematic hair he always hated and fought with every morning in front of the mirror. Stupid battles, they’ll think, armed with the proportions imposed on them by the disease, which will only make things worse, because they will make them feel sad not only because of what’s ahead but also for what’s past, and who has the strength to deal with the past now, on top of everything else?

  And their bed already smells of medicine, and the few days he has left, and the endless days in which she’ll try to inspire him with false hope, when all she’ll want to do is get out of the house for a while and sit alone in a café. And we want to say something encouraging to this woman, something that will save her from the terror of guessing and the loneliness, something along the lines of: Sometimes death is the easy part, but we keep silent and plan how to bring this ritual, which we need to cut short because we have no time to spare, to a dignified conclusion, how we’ll get up from our swivel chair and walk over to our patient and lay our hand on his shoulder, which always tends to droop a little after receiving such news, and raise him to his feet and walk him to the door, behind which wait, anxious and submissive, patients who are paying us fees they cannot afford in hopes that we won’t tell them what we’ve just told this nice couple, who are already disappearing into the elevator and who have eight floors in which to digest the news before they land in the parking lot.

  But Mr. Rosen is now roaming the hospital corridors in search of the cafeteria and ruining our plans, and we look at the woman who is crying and flooding our office with something violent and physical that, like her husband’s tumor, we don’t know how to deal with, and blowing her nose and asking: “How long does he have?” And before we have a chance to remind ourselves that we must never become too involved in one person’s sad story, the patient reappears in the doorway, holding a sandwich wrapped in cellophane.