Safekeeping

by Jessamyn Hope

  Ulya turned to look at her roommate, who stood, gazing at the boy, hands clasped in front of her white sundress, painted lips in a small smile. Everything about Claudette seemed different: her hair longer, cheeks pinker, eyes brighter. She was so much prettier than upon her arrival. How had she not noticed this transformation?

  “Yes, things change,” said Ulya, heading for the door. “I’ll get Adam.”

  When Adam heard the knocking, he didn’t budge. He remained on the bed with a beer in one hand, Dagmar’s note in the other. For the hundredth time, he searched the words for a clue. It was almost two weeks since Eyal, after much begging, put him on probation, and though he’d managed since then to do a passable job in the dishroom, he’d made no progress with his search for Dagmar. Or his sobriety.

  The knock came again. He stared at the door, hoping the person would just go away. The knock came a third time before Ulya poked in her head. “You ready?”

  “Ready for what?”

  She stepped into the room. “What do you mean ‘ready for what’?”

  Ulya didn’t know what to make of Adam’s expression. As she walked toward him, his eyes enlarged. Oh my God. She came to a stop. He could tell. “What? Why are you staring at me like that?”

  “You look . . . you look . . . incredible. More stunning than ever.”

  Ulya breathed again. She shook her head as if she were above needing such flattery, but inside she felt the rush of his words.

  “Well, I’m all dressed up for the rave, remember? Come on, we’re leaving now.”

  “Rave?” He shook his head. “No thanks.”

  “But you promised you would come.”

  “No, I didn’t. That never happened.”

  “Come on.” She took him by the wrist and pulled. He remembered that first day when she wanted to show him the magazine, and it felt like a long time ago. “You have to come!”

  “Why? Why do I have to come?”

  “Because I . . . I want you there.”

  She hadn’t had to pretend to be in love with him yet and was hoping she could get the job done under the guise of friendship. Adam, however, couldn’t help but wonder if she were reconsidering him. Why else would she be hanging around all the time? She wasn’t being flirty, but she watched him like she did before, when she seemed to be waiting for him to do that one thing that would settle her mind about him. He didn’t know how seriously to take the renewed attention. She might just be lonely, now that she no longer sneaked off to see her Arab boyfriend. But then, maybe, just maybe, after not seeing or speaking to either of them, she had realized that it was him, Adam, that she missed. Yeah, right.

  “Come on, Adam who will always be young.”

  He smiled, touched that she remembered him saying that.

  “Come on!”

  She could see him wavering, that all he needed was one more nudge. “There’s going to be free alcohol.”

  Free alcohol? He looked down at the six-pack waiting on the floor beside the bed. He’d drunk two. If he went to this party, he could save the others for tomorrow. A week after getting his monthly stipend, he’d already blown through half of it. In another week he’d have no money for beer. Maybe that was a good thing, having no way of buying booze for two weeks.

  “All right, let me get dressed.”

  She gave him a big smile and released his wrist. After the door closed behind her, he chugged the rest of his bottle and schlepped to the bathroom. He splashed cold water on his face and ran a hand over his stubble, assessing his reflection. He could really use a shave. He picked up the razor but then decided against shaving with that dull blade again. He’d already made that mistake three times. After much effort, he squeezed a smudge of toothpaste out of a shriveled tube and brushed his teeth for a count of ten, nowhere near Zayde’s hundred. He shook the can of hair mousse but got nothing.

  Everything in his closet was nasty. He hadn’t had his clothes laundered in weeks, even though he just had to drop the shit off. The hangers were empty, everything heaped on the floor. He rooted through the shirts, sniffing their pits, until he found a red tee that stunk a little less than the others. He swapped his work pants for jeans, deciding no underwear was better than dirty ones, and transferred the brooch.

  Heading for the door, he passed Golda’s empty bowls. How long had the water bowl been dry? In a panic he looked back at Golda curled on the unused bed. Had it been days? He hurried to fill the bowl in the bathroom sink. The moment he set it on the floor, Golda flew off the bed. The chihuahua lapped at the water, the desperate little slurps killing Adam. Tomorrow he couldn’t forget to bring chicken back from the dining hall.

  Outside he found Ofir, Claudette, and Ulya around the picnic table. Ulya pointed into the tree, its red fruit now closer in size to softballs than baseballs. “Pomegranate.”

  “That’s pomegranate?” Adam felt ill.

  Ofir laughed. “What? All three of you have never had a pomegranate?” He rose from the table and searched the boughs, inspecting the fruit with the aura of experience. “They’re probably a week away from ripe, but maybe you can try one on the outside of the tree that got a lot of sunlight.” He pulled a fruit off and held it out for them. “In Hebrew it’s called rimmon, the same word for hand grenade, because the earliest grenades looked exactly like them. Some modern ones still do.”

  “Ah,” Claudette said. “Pomme, grenade.”

  Ofir steadied the pomegranate against the table and pulled a Swiss Army knife out of his back pocket. “It’s packed with little seeds the way a hand grenade is packed with gunpowder.”

  Held on its side like that, with only three of the spikes in its little Budweiser crown visible, Adam could see how it looked a little like the stylized pomegranates on the brooch, but the spikes on the brooch were much longer, almost as long as the fruits themselves, making them look more like jester hats than crowns. Maybe if the goldsmith had seen a pomegranate, he would have made something Adam might have recognized. Mr. Weisberg guessed the goldsmith had never seen the fruit, only dreamed of it the way he dreamed of seeing the Promised Land. And here Adam had been in the Promised Land for months with a pomegranate tree right outside his window. The little flowers in the brooch’s other quadrants were probably the red flowers that bloomed on the tree the week he arrived.

  Ofir sawed down the sides of the fruit and broke it open, revealing jellylike beads reminiscent of the red salmon roe at Russ & Daughters. Ofir handed them each a wedge. Ulya picked a seed off with her sky-blue fingernails while Adam brought the wedge to his mouth and pulled off some seeds with his teeth. Ofir shook his head. “Too sour. Try again next week.”

  The four of them walked to the parking lot, where many of the cars had been taken out for Friday night. While Ofir fetched a key, Ulya inhaled the warm smell of summer, a bouquet of baked asphalt, dried pine needles, and swimming pool chlorine. What did old people smell when they smelled a summer night—nostalgia? To her, this was the smell of being young and free and knowing anything could happen tonight. She loved that feeling, the feeling that it was all up in the air, nothing had landed yet. Funny, she had told Adam only a few weeks ago that she never thought about growing old.

  As they walked toward their car, she watched her reflection in the windows of the other cars. Though she felt bloated and bilious, Adam was right: on the outside she looked as gorgeous as ever. And then it struck her: this was the last time she would be young and free and gorgeous at a party. Of course, she knew all that was going to come to an end with a baby, but somehow she hadn’t recognized that tonight would be the last hurrah. Now she watched her image pass over the car windows as if she were watching someone she loved walking away forever.

  They climbed into a compact and drove away from the kibbutz, down the hill and onto a country road flanked by fields. Ulya stared out the window, and once again Adam found he preferred to watch Ulya looking out the window than to look out it himself. Her face was pensive tonight, darker than it had been that day they we
nt to Tel Aviv. As Ulya bloused her T-shirt away from her belly, she noticed Adam’s gaze on her. She forced herself to smile at him, and he thought, yes, she was definitely being nice again.

  Ofir slowed the car and turned into a field of wheat, not onto a road traversing a field, but into a wall of wheat. The car plowed through the dense straw, headlights blanching the stalks seconds before they smacked the windshield and smothered the side windows.

  Adam leaned between the front seats. “Ofir, are you a serial killer?”

  Ulya laughed. “Oh! It’s a secret party!”

  The headlights landed on the back of a jalopy covered in peace now bumper stickers. They had joined a slow-moving convoy making its way toward a concrete rotunda rising out of the wheat like an ancient temple. Ofir turned off the AC, and they rolled down their windows, letting in the wafts of pot and the muffled thumps of techno music. Ulya caught Ofir giving Claudette a covert wink.

  None of them knew what to expect as they entered the silo. No disco ball hung from the towering dome, no strobe lights roamed the open space, but the darkness still flashed with color. The people jumping to the electronic bass waved orange and yellow glow sticks. Some blew on neon whistles. Many sported tank tops and pants with glow-in-the-dark designs. On their feet were sneakers, sandals, or nothing at all. Only Ulya wore high heels.

  Three young men hurried up to Ofir and took turns giving him hugs. “Ofir! It’s so good to see you! So, so good! How are you?” One of them pointed at the three foreigners: “And who are your friends?” When Ofir gave no special introduction to Claudette—they were all just “volunteers from his kibbutz”—Ulya put together why she and Adam had been invited: so he could bring Claudette without giving away that they were a couple. The boys insisted Ofir come say hello to others who would be relieved to see him out and about, and he allowed them to drag him off.

  Adam scanned the silo for a bar. “I can’t dance to this electronic crap. And where’s the booze? You said there would be free booze, Ulya.”

  Ulya had to resist giving him a dirty look. He was right, though; she didn’t see a bar. She hadn’t really expected there to be free drinks, but none? How could you have a party without alcohol? This wasn’t good for the plan. It was going to be harder, if not impossible, to get the brooch off Adam if he were sober and irritated the whole night. But she couldn’t let this bring her down. If this was her last hurrah, she was going to enjoy it.

  “This is not my fault. I was told there would be free alcohol.”

  Bopping her head to the music, Ulya scanned the silo for what everybody hoped to find at a party—someone hot. But how could any man look sexy in those ridiculous fisherman pants? And then her eyes landed on the eyes of a man a head taller than everyone around him and so handsome she almost stopped swaying to the beat. She gave him a slow crooked smile that said, I see you staring at me and I don’t blame you. The guy broke into a grin, and the promise shot across the silo that before long he would come over to talk to her.

  Oh, wow. Ulya looked away, trying not to let on how much fun she was having, more fun than she remembered this being. She rubbed her glossy lips together.

  “Your boyfriend . . .” she shouted over the music at Claudette, who was nervously twisting the waist of her white sundress. “He’s a child, yes?”

  Claudette looked down as if she had dropped something.

  “How old is he?” she asked as if she didn’t know.

  Claudette scrunched her face and raised her shoulders.

  Ulya brought her mouth to her ear. “How old is Ofir?”

  “Eighteen. Almost.”

  “What?” She wanted to make her say it again.

  Claudette spoke a tad louder: “Eighteen. Almost.”

  “Almost?” She laughed. “Almost half your age, you mean.”

  Her teasing brought back much of Claudette’s homeliness—that bloodless, straight-lipped look—but then she felt a little bad about it. Hadn’t she been living in fear of people teasing her about Farid? She patted Claudette on the shoulder. “Well, good for you!” Under her breath, she added, “Lyubov’ zla, polyubish i kozla.” Love’s evil, you’ll love even a goat.

  Adam had given up on the idea of a bar and now searched for someone who’d brought their own booze. Otherwise, he didn’t know what he was going to do. There was no way to escape this party, to get back to the kibbutz. He was trapped, surrounded by a field of wheat, reminding him of those Vietnam movies where impassable jungle surrounded the POW camp. His forehead bristled with sweat, and the wafts of weed sickened him. That was the one drug he couldn’t stand, nor the slow “everything’s cool” potheads who smoked it. Wait: if this was a rave, there was ecstasy. Was that it? No alcohol because everyone was on X? He hoped not. At least when it came to drugs, he still had four months clean.

  Adam observed the rapt crowd gathered around Ofir—guys nodding, girls gazing up with starstruck empathy. It was fucked up, but he couldn’t help feeling a little jealous. Ofir was woven into history now, his pain a part of something bigger than himself. His wounds had gravitas, nobility; they weren’t meaningless. Or shameful. Adam’s own pain wouldn’t be quite as shameful if he too could claim he was a victim—a victim of being born weak, or burdened with a terrible dread in his chest, a dread worse than other people’s. Sometimes he allowed himself to believe that was true, but the fact remained that he still had a choice every time he brought a bottle to his mouth or snorted a line. Or maybe he didn’t. No, he did. Of course. And anyway, choice or not, there was nothing noble about fingers burned on crack pipes.

  A man-made thunder rumbled inside the dome, followed by a dreamful piano riff. Everyone burst into hoots and whistles. This had to be the song of the summer, because anyone who wasn’t already dancing abandoned the cement walls and rushed for the dirt dance floor. Ofir came back and said: “Maybe we should dance too.” Claudette followed him into the crowd, as did Ulya, who was eager to start dancing. Adam, not wanting to be left alone, tagged after them.

  Beneath the pretty piano and the rumbling thunder, an electronic sequencer built up from a low bass, getting faster and faster, and higher and higher, while everyone swayed in what looked like blissful anticipation, eyes half shut, smiling. Ofir, Claudette, and Adam stepped side to side. Ulya, keeping her feet in place, gyrated her hips. Sexy dancing wasn’t this party’s style, but she didn’t care, she liked sexy dancing. Not to mention a girl could only move her feet so much in five-inch heels. The sequencer got still faster and higher until it was a solid high-pitched whistle. A distress signal. People stopped swaying and waited, waited—

  Boom! The signal exploded. Boom boom boom boom boom. The crowd jumped, jumped, jumped, beating the air with their fists, tweeting their whistles, whooping. Ofir started jumping and shouted at his guests as if this weren’t his first rave: “Come on! Yalla! Jump!” The three foreigners looked around at the jumpers, mostly army-aged kids, meaning many had either just finished their service in the West Bank or Lebanon or were about to start it. They looked hell-bent on having a good time.

  Claudette jumped first. Initially she barely lifted off the ground, but gradually her jumps got higher. Adam raised his eyebrows at the woman who normally moved like an automaton jumping up and down. “Jump!” Ofir shouted at him, and Adam shook his head. “Come on, jump!” He rolled his eyes and gave one jump. And then a second. Soon, like Claudette, he jumped higher. He had to laugh, because the more he jumped, the more he felt like jumping, like a little kid. He missed being a little kid.

  That left only Ulya. The jumpers did not look cool to her. Were they jumping like this in Manhattan? But what could she do? This was the party she was at. Her last party. She kicked off her stilettos and, unlike the others, jumped as high as she could right away. Ofir took Claudette’s and Ulya’s hands and told them to take Adam’s. The four held hands with the beats coming at them so fast they couldn’t think, only jump, jump, grinning and laughing at one another, each with their own reason for wishing they coul
d jump like this forever.

  When the song ended, Ofir whisked Claudette away through the sweating bodies. Panting, Adam turned to Ulya, who had given herself to the next song, throwing her hips from side to side, whipping her cherry-red hair. He had her all to himself on a dance floor, what would have been a dream only a few weeks ago, but now he couldn’t enjoy it, not without a drink. He wiped the sweat from his upper lip and shouted at her that he was going to be right back.

  “Why?” She propped her arms on his shoulders. “Where are you going?”

  Her touch surprised him. The dancing had put her in a good mood. “To look for some booze.”

  “Oh. Oh, yes. Go do that! But promise to come back.”

  Adam left the silo through a towering rectangular exit in the cement. Outside, the night was hot but the air felt fresher. Only a few people loitered on this side of the silo, smoking cigarettes, making out; most people, he supposed, were on the other side, where the cars had flattened down the wheat. Maybe one of those cars had a cooler in a popped trunk.

  After taking a piss in the stalks, Adam started around the outside of the moonlit dome. Where the hell was he? The question came to him, the one he’d been pushing away: What if it were time to go home? He didn’t think he could bear it. But he also couldn’t bear being here anymore. The wheat was nightmarish, the army of stalks standing dead still and then, when the wind picked up, swaying so uniformly, so unfeelingly.

  As he circled the dome, hunting for beer, he was reminded of that first night he snorted coke, how he walked around the outside of Bryant Park, back when it was bordered by tall hedges and half its lamps were busted, giving dark cover to streetwalkers and dealers. He must have rounded that block—the massive library and the park behind it—ten times before giving in and buying his first bump. Actually, he didn’t buy it: the pusher, a skinny black kid nicknamed Haircut, gave him his first for free, so long as he promised to come back and buy from him if he liked it. Haircut had him rub the dollar bill on his gums. That was 1984, a week short of his sixteenth birthday, two months before his expulsion from Stuy. For a long time he thought if only he had circled the block an eleventh time and gone home to Zayde. But that was ridiculous. If not then, it would have been the next day or the next year. That night, it was the library’s stone lions that lacked sympathy, staring out with their pupil-less eyes.