Three Floors Up

by Eshkol Nevo

  The reading lamp illuminated her. Her skin was smooth, no scratches, no wrinkles, no marks except for the Star of David on her left breast. She had a perfect body. A girl’s body. And I felt dizzy. Not a good kind of dizzy. More like the kind you get in very high places. When you make the mistake of looking down.

  “Get dressed,” I said.

  “But Arno, I thought that—”

  “It’s…it’s not okay, Karinne.”

  Then she snapped. She folded into herself, stark naked, and collapsed to the floor near the armchair and started to cry. She cried like a child too. Lots of sniffling. And between sniffles, she said things like, “I’m ugly. You don’t want me because I’m ugly. I repulse you. I’m fat. My legs are crooked. You don’t want me because my legs are crooked.”

  I sat down close to her on the rug. I told myself that I had to calm her down or she wouldn’t want to get into Ruth’s email. And I’d never know what happened to Ofri in the grove. I stroked her hair. I said, “You’re very attractive, Karinne, very, very attractive. Your body is beautiful. And your feet are small and lovely. I dreamed about you every night this week.”

  She said I was lying. Her fine hair hid her face and her voice seemed to purr as it passed through it.

  I told her that I never lie. And kept stroking her hair to the place where it met her suntanned shoulder.

  She said, “What you’re doing, it feels good.”

  If I was a character in one of your stories, it would have ended there. With you, everyone always stops at the last second. Before the abyss. But in real life, it’s not like that. Because at that stage, I myself was already convinced of all the things I said to her. And I was already stroking the length of her naked back, and she raised her head, took my hand and put my finger in her mouth. And sucked. And I got a hard-on. In real life, when a man passes a certain point, it’s hard for him to stop.

  I’ll spare you the details. Actually, there’s not a lot to describe. Let’s just say that it was very far from my fantasies. Everything was very slow, but not sexy slow. Kind of clumsy. It didn’t flow. Without the flip-flops and clothes, she looked small and vulnerable, and that made me cautious with her. I didn’t really know what to do with my big body, how not to crush her under me. Don’t forget that I hadn’t been with another woman for twenty years. And when I took my prick out of her, I saw that it was covered with blood. I wasn’t really surprised. From the way she froze when I entered her and the way she tried to fake an orgasm without even knowing what she was supposed to fake. It was easy to guess that it was her first time.

  After she wiped herself with her shirt, I asked her why she didn’t tell me she was a virgin.

  She stroked my arm and said, “Because I…didn’t want you to think I was a little girl.”

  All of a sudden, I had this idiotic but strong fear that my father would walk in and drag me out of the living room into the hallway of the building and ask me, But what about Ayelet?!

  So I asked her if the door was locked.

  She said yes, sure.

  I asked whether I’d hurt her and she said a little, and kept stroking my arm. It was annoying. Ayelet always gives me these little kisses on the neck after we fuck. Suddenly I missed that. So I sat up and said, “Come on, let’s go to your grandmother’s computer.”

  “There’s no reason to go to it,” she said.

  “What do you mean, no reason? What about your grandmother’s emails to Elsa?”

  “There is no Elsa.”

  “There’s no Elsa?”

  “No.”

  I wanted to slap her, but I fought to control myself. I actually pressed my hands on my thighs so that neither of them would fly out toward her cheek. Or grab the Mozart bust and throw it at her. Get up, I told myself. Wash off. Get dressed. And get the hell out of here. She’s flying to Paris tonight, and until then, all you can do is minimize damages.

  So that’s what I did. I stood up. Washed her blood off me. Got dressed. Said that I had to go to work. I told her she was very beautiful. That she would make a lot of men happy someday. I asked her if she wanted me to bring her a glass of water. Or make her some coffee. I gave her respect. And she was silent the whole time. She leaned against the armchair and watched me wherever I went. She hugged her knees close to her body. Curled her hair around her finger. Even when I bent down and kissed her goodbye on the cheek, she didn’t say anything. At the time, I took that as a sign of acceptance. Of maturity.

  But just to be on the safe side, I came back from work as late as I could. So I wouldn’t bump into her by accident.

  There was no note waiting for me on the bedroom door. Ayelet had taken it down. Even so, I exiled myself to the living room voluntarily. I watched Grandstanders twice. The rerun too. In the rerun, you could tell that the panelists weren’t yelling out of real anger. That they were faking it. That the director was telling them to raise their voices every time the program started to drag. Then I lay down and stared at the ceiling, rerunning the events of the day in my mind, and I said to myself, What did you do, you moron, what did you do? But I also said to myself, Calm down, she must be in Paris by now.

  That’s when I texted you the first time. I knew you were the only person I could talk to about this. Even though we haven’t been in touch for a long time. My other friends are too new. Too connected to Ayelet. I don’t trust them not to sell me out. You would never sell me out. I know too much about you.

  Just kidding.

  You don’t have to apologize, bro. I knew you wouldn’t answer right away. It was four in the morning. It’s just that I remembered your telling me once that you write at night, so I tried. I doesn’t matter.

  In the morning, I walked Ofri to school. She finished the last few pages of Anne of Avonlea as we were walking and stopped to put the book in her bag. Then she told me about the little fights the girls in her class have. Alma said this, and then Mayan got insulted, and then Roni told all the girls not to talk to Alma. And then Alma got insulted. I couldn’t believe it was happening. She hadn’t mentioned anyone in her class for five weeks on our walks to school.

  At the spot where we separated, she said again, “Daddy, I love you.” I waited a few minutes after she went through the school gate and then followed. I climbed to the third floor and peeked into her classroom through the opening in the curtain. She was sitting there doing the same things she’d done the last time I looked in at her. Playing with the zipper of her pencil case. Taking out crayons. Drawing in her notebook. Putting the crayons back in the pencil case. But then the teacher asked something and she looked up and raised her hand. That’s when I saw her eyes. The mischievous, curious gleam was back.

  I restrained myself from racing into the classroom and hoisting her into the air with joy. The gleam was back! I stood at the curtain for another few minutes and waited for her to look up again. So I could be sure I hadn’t made a mistake. Then I texted Ayelet: “I’m sorry for the way I’ve been lately. I really did get carried away. Want to make up?” And I went home. This time I walked on the sidewalk, not in the middle of the road. My life was suddenly precious to me. On the way, I stopped at the shopping center to withdraw cash. The widow from the floor above us was at the ATM. I waited for her to finish. She’s not really a widow, but her husband is always out of the country and she has the eyes of someone who just got back from a funeral and she always wears black, so Ayelet and I call her that just between ourselves. But even she was smiling that morning. And she was wearing a yellow blouse for a change. When she finished with the ATM, she said, “Good morning, Arnon.” And I said, “An excellent morning.” Then I withdrew the thousand shekels we owed the Wolfs and walked home, taking long strides, and for the first time in five weeks, I was breathing normally and wasn’t constantly holding the air in my chest, and all the problems about everything suddenly seemed small and solvable.

  But when I reached the building, she was standing outside. The little mademoiselle. She started walking toward me. On her platfor
m flip-flops. I couldn’t avoid her. Even if I’d wanted to. She was coming straight at me, and when she was close, she stopped and said, “Hug me.”

  I took a step back and asked, “Weren’t you supposed to fly to Paris?”

  She moved closer to me. “My grandfather…he died.”

  “What?!”

  “Last night.” She took my hand and put it around her waist. “Hug me.”

  “I’m sorry for your loss, but…it’s not a good idea to hug here in the middle of the street, Karinne, it’s really not a good idea.” I moved my hand away as gently as I could.

  She pressed her pelvis against mine. “We must go away together. I want you. I need you.”

  “I can’t. What happened—it was a onetime thing. I’m married. I have two daughters. I can’t. I’m sorry, Karinne. But it’s not right.”

  And then, all at once, she turned into a different person. We’re standing in the middle of the building parking area at 8:30 in the morning, and she starts punching me in the chest. “All of a sudden you’re married?” she screamed. “When you had sex with me yesterday, you didn’t care! You’re a bastard! That’s what you are. A bastard!”

  Luckily, the city cleaners were working on the garden with leaf blowers, so it muffled her screams a little. Even so, I thought I saw the judge on the third floor peering out of her window. And it was clear to me that if it went on like that, there’d be more people peering out of windows.

  Somehow, I managed to grab her elbow and push her into the car. She kept cursing me in Hebrew and French, but at least now it was with closed windows. I tried to calm her down on the way to the parking lot at the squash court. I lied to her. During a two-minute ride I told more lies than I’d told my whole life. She screamed, “I’ll knock on your door and tell your wife everything. I’ll do it because you’re a bastard.” That scared me. I promised her the moon and the stars. To gain time. I promised her I’d visit her in Paris. I promised her we’d rent a hotel room near the beach in Tel Aviv. Tomorrow. Day after tomorrow the latest. I told her that I had feelings for her too. That it wasn’t only sex for me.

  I know, man, I know, I should have put her in her place. But I was scared.

  We sat in the squash court parking lot through ten songs. She cried in that runny-nose way of hers until the seventh song, occasionally mumbling that I was a shit and a liar, or a liar and a shit. The seventh song was Radiohead’s “Karma Police,” and at the chorus, out of nowhere, she started telling me about all kinds of moments she had with her grandfather. The stories weren’t all neatly organized like the ones about the guys at the beach. They didn’t have beginnings, sometimes they had no endings, and sometimes they disappeared in the middle: “And then he picked me up and held me high in the air in the middle of the airport and said, ‘You’re home.’ ” Where? What airport? What home? It wasn’t clear. And when the camp counselor asked him if he was Karinne’s father, he said yes without batting an eyelash, and he signed all his letters to her, “With Eternal Love, Grandpa Herman.” And once he said to her, “Your father might have gone to college, but he’s an imbecile if he left a wonderful little girl like you,” and after lunch, he would give her a second dessert when Grandma wasn’t looking, and at bedtime he would make up stories for her about a girl named Karinna who was brave and kind and always helped animals run away from the zoo and back to their real home in Africa. They went to Africa for her bat mitzvah, just she and her grandpa—Grandma didn’t like traveling—and she was hot for a boy in the tour group and spent the whole trip with him, and her grandfather didn’t say a word, didn’t tease her, also because he himself was flirting with the young tour guide, and once at a barbecue they had with friends, she saw him kiss Grandma’s friend behind the storeroom in the garden, and he told her later, “It’s our secret, we don’t have to tell Grandma, it would only hurt her.” They always had their secrets, she and Grandpa, and that’s why it had been so weird this last week, because she felt that he was hiding something from her. That he was ashamed about something. He had never been ashamed before. Never. But it doesn’t matter anymore. He’s dead now.

  “Yes,” I said, and the picture of his head on Ofri’s lap came into my mind. “Looks like your grandfather will take his secrets to the grave with him.”

  Karinne nodded, sniffled noisily and wetly, and asked me to take her home. She had to get ready for the funeral. Pick a dress. I hugged her. Of course I hugged her after everything she told me. It sounded like she really loved her grandfather. That they had a special connection. And I also felt a bit guilty, you know. Not that he died because of me, but he was hospitalized because of me. There was no disputing that. So I hugged her. But a fatherly kind of hug, you know. Clean.

  On the way home, she didn’t talk. I thought that the anger she’d had before had passed. I thought that she had gone back to being herself. That she understood there was no point in knocking on the door across the hall, and for all our sakes she should put the whole thing behind us. But then, just when I’m pulling into the building parking area and taking the key out of the ignition, she turns to me and says, “Your wife will definitely come to the funeral, yes? Very good. So I will tell her everything there.”

  And before I could say anything, she opened the door and got out.

  I stayed in the car. Stunned. I sat there for a few minutes and didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t breathe. I opened all the windows but I still couldn’t get enough air. I felt a kind of pressure in my chest. Then I felt pressured because of the pressure. Then your text message came.

  You always had good timing.

  No, really, bro, I definitely don’t take it for granted that you agreed to meet me at the last minute like this. We haven’t seen each other for what, a year? You don’t have to apologize. We’re at that stage of life when everyone has his head up his ass. But you definitely came through.

  You know, just telling someone the story relieves the…

  I had some thoughts after she got out of the car. You don’t want to know. Bad thoughts. The kind you want to stop the minute they start but can’t. You just can’t. It’s a kind of loop you just can’t get out of. And slowly those bad thoughts fill your whole mind. And in the end, there’s no room for anything but them.

  Forget it, you don’t really want to know.

  I thought about chasing her. Grabbing her before she punched in the code at the entrance to the building. Dragging her to the car by force. Taking her to the beach, swimming far out with her after the lifeguards leave their stations and drowning her there, holding her head underwater until the bubbles of her breath stopped.

  And she’s small. It shouldn’t take more than a minute.

  I don’t think I’ll do that. I’m just giving you an example of the things going through my head so you can understand how low I’d sunk. You see, I am this close to losing everything I have. A few words she’d say to Ayelet at the funeral—and that would be the end. Everything I’ve built, everything would be destroyed.

  Are you kidding? Ayelet would never give me a pass on it. Inside a week, she’d hand me the divorce papers. Believe me. Before we got married, she told me what was what. She said, “I’ve been through a lot in my life. I can take tough blows. And pull myself up again. But I’m not willing to accept infidelity. That’s my red line.” She said, “I’m telling you this now so you’ll know in advance. So you won’t be surprised.” And she’s a lawyer, don’t forget. She’d make sure that I never see the girls again. And that all our property goes to her. She’ll drink my blood through a straw, I’m telling you. Not to mention that according to the law, the mademoiselle is a minor. I can already see the two of them sitting in our kitchen, and Ayelet is convincing her—in a show of female solidarity—to press charges against me. And then it’s court. And the judge won’t care that she’s the one who seduced me, that she’s the one who told me about the vibrator she left in Paris, that she’s the one who undressed before I even laid a hand on her.

  It’s like with
Gaza. No one in the world cares that they’d been firing rockets on us for years before we went in there.

  I’d get actual prison time. And when I’d be released, no one would give me work. And Ofri, they’d harass her in school. The girls in her class would have a field day with it. I saw your father in the papers, your father’s a pervert. They’d make her life miserable.

  And for what? All I wanted was to watch over my women, to protect them. To make sure no one hurt them.

  Everything I did, I did out of love. Do you believe me?

  Maybe I love too intensely. Maybe that’s my problem.

  People today don’t love like that.

  I’m not crying. Of course not. My eyes are burning a little, that’s all. I think it’s from the onions they’re frying in the kitchen.

  I’m sensitive to onions. I swear. I cut the onions for the Saturday morning shakshuka with my eyes closed. Here, look at the scars on my fingers.

  Do I want a glass of water? What do I look like? Order me a draft beer. And a steak. I have to dig my teeth into something. You want one too? You’re sure? You won’t make a gesture and join me in my last supper?

  I’m not exaggerating. That’s how I feel. Like Jesus before they crucified him. No, like Jesus on the cross. The nails have already been hammered into my palms. And the blood is starting to trickle out.

  Did you ever feel like you’re living the last few minutes of your life as you know it?

  Right, I forgot. How many years ago was that?

  In the end it wasn’t malignant, right? What luck!

  You and Shiri have been together since the army, right? Listen, after twenty years with a woman, you’re all mixed together. If she leaves you, she leaves with you. Or at least parts of you. Ayelet and I are Siamese twins. I haven’t made a decision in the last few years without asking her first. I always tell people, Let me sleep on it. But actually, I’m waiting for the minute the kids fall asleep. I make her a cup of instant coffee with a drop of chocolate milk powder in it, the way she likes it, and then tell her about my hesitations. And she tells me what I should do. I don’t always accept what she says, but she always makes me see the real dilemma I’m facing. Makes me see the heart of it, not all the stuff around it. And we’re not the kind of couple who, with time, turn into friends. I’m just as hot for her as I was when we first started. I get turned on from just seeing her get dressed for court. I’m crazy about the way she looks, the way she smells, the way she dances with the girls to YouTube songs on Saturdays.