The Two Hearts of Eliza Bloom

by Beth Miller

  I sent Dov a slightly desperate eyebrow semaphore.

  ‘Dad, can you help me with something?’ Dov said, picking up my cue immediately.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘I can’t understand this section in the reading we were given today…’

  ‘Let me have a look.’

  Clever, lovely Dov. Dad could never resist a chance to show off his Talmudic knowledge. He put his arm round Dov’s shoulders and they went into the living room.

  ‘Eliza?’

  ‘I’m here.’ I whispered, ‘I’ll miss you too. Hope your mum’s OK.’

  ‘It’s only a check-up. Since Dad died, me and my brother take turns to do these sorts of things with her. Anyway, I will be thinking about you the whole time.’

  ‘Will you?’

  ‘I really like you, Eliza.’

  I felt a warmth creep over my whole body. ‘You do?’

  Down the line, he laughed. ‘A lot.’

  ‘I like you too,’ I said.

  Jonny appeared in the hall, and hearing this, whistled at me. He assumed, of course, that I was talking to Nathan.

  ‘I’ve got to go,’ I said, and hung up, quickly, before anyone could grab the phone from me.

  The next time we met, Alex gave me a small mobile phone, and showed me how to call and message him on it. This released us from the tyranny of my phone at home, and gave us a great deal of freedom to fine-tune arrangements. Even better, it meant that we could speak regularly outside of the café meetings. I began to rely on him sending me a funny little message every night before bed, and I loved sending him a morning message when I woke up. I hid the phone in my wardrobe, wrapped inside a jumper, and always made sure it was turned off, so Becca and Gila didn’t hear it and go looking for it.

  I met Alex almost every day for three weeks. Same café, same table. I always arrived at five fifteen, and left an hour later with my head spinning, full of ideas we’d discussed, things I’d learned, new thoughts I’d had. And yes, all right, new desires I’d felt. It was a wonder no one at home noticed how distracted I was. I lied to them every day about why I was late home, juggling excuses of lesson planning, or visiting Deborah. The lying was there right from the start.

  I had to tell Deb finally, because Alex suggested we go to the cinema and as soon as he had said it, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I wanted to go to the cinema with Alex more than I had wanted anything in my life. The thought of it made me shiver. I visited Deb on the Sunday, when I knew Michael would be out, and told her the truth. Of course, she was shocked, but I assured her I was committed to Nathan, and that I was trying to get the other man out of my system. Because she knew me so well – she still teased me sometimes about the rebellious child I’d been – she agreed to cover for me.

  I met Alex outside the cinema – a big one near Brent Cross, quite far from my house. He was already waiting when I rushed up, late, after getting lost. There were spangles of rain in his hair, like diamonds.

  ‘What will we see?’ I asked. I felt sick with excitement.

  ‘You choose,’ he said, and pointed to a display of posters advertising the films. ‘There are three starting soon. There’s Eyes Wide Shut, but I think that might be a bit rude. Or,’ and he coughed, embarrassed, ‘there’s Runaway Bride.’

  I looked at the poster for that film. A girl wearing a white wedding type of dress, her legs bare, was tying the laces of her training shoes. A man smiled smugly in the background.

  ‘Maybe not,’ Alex said, catching sight of my expression. ‘I think it had better be The Sixth Sense. I’ve heard it has a twist, let’s see if we can guess it.’

  Seeing that film was one of the most amazing things that had ever happened to me. Walking in together unchaperoned, like everyone else; red soft seats; a huge screen in front of us; the overwhelming volume of the sound which startled me for the first half hour when anyone spoke; the crystal-clear images; the strangeness of the ghost story; and above all, the man sitting next to me in the dark, mere inches away, the sleeve of his jacket so close to my hand that I would barely have had to move to touch it.

  When we came outside it seemed extraordinary that the world was still there, the same as it had been before. I turned to Alex and said, ‘That was so beautiful.’

  ‘Not as beautiful as you. You’re radiant, Eliza.’ He leaned forward and his lips gently pressed against mine. It was the first time we had ever touched.

  For one magical moment, I kissed him back, as if I was in a dream.

  It lasted no more than a second, but it changed everything.

  Alex tried to take my hand, but I pulled away, and put myself, my hands and my lips out of reach.

  ‘I want to offer you a different way of life,’ he said.

  ‘I can’t,’ I said, and started crying. I had never felt more confused or overwhelmed, not ever.

  ‘Eliza, I’m ready,’ he said. ‘Are you?’

  ‘They’d never forgive me,’ I said, and I left him, walking away fast. I heard him calling my name and I was so anxious he might come after me that I started running and didn’t stop until I was on the tube. I banged and banged on Deb’s door and when she finally opened it, looking confused and in her nightgown, I threw myself in her arms. I told her that it – whatever it was – was over.

  ‘Really over?’ she said.

  ‘The truth is, I love him, Deb. I love him so much, but I know I can’t be with him. So it’s over.’

  She hugged me tight. ‘It’s the right thing, Crazy Kid. I know it’s hard, but you’re doing the right thing.’

  I stopped going to the café, and I permanently turned off the phone Alex had given me. I let myself get involved in arrangements for my wedding to Nathan. Gila braided my hair in a new style. Deborah helped me decide on a dress. Uri, my oldest brother, was nicer to me than he’d been for years; like my father, he’d been angered by my failure to agree to a match, but now, he told me how much I’d love being married, and even told me a slightly risqué joke about a wedding night.

  Life went on. I made Zaida his tea every morning. I laughed with Dov and Jonny over the funny things the children in my class said. Becca and I helped our mother with the housework like model daughters.

  I went round in a daze, but no one seemed to notice.

  And that was that.

  Something like two months went by, and it was the day before the wedding. I was going through my clothes, planning what to take with me to the marital home, and what to leave for Becca. Then I came across the phone. It wasn’t that I’d forgotten I had it, more that I had deliberately put it out of my mind, put it into the closed box marked ‘Alex.’ Just seeing it made me feel something. Not numb. I knew I shouldn’t turn it on, but nothing could have stopped me. There were messages. Lots of messages. I sat on the floor, my back against the door so that no one could come in, and I read them all, from the first to the last, which had been sent earlier that day.

  ‘Eliza, I wish you the very best with your wedding. I know it’s tomorrow. I’ll be thinking of you all day. In the unlikely event that you read this, please know that I love you, and I always will. All I hope for you is that you are happy and fulfilled. A.’

  I snapped out of my daze, and rang his number.

  ‘Eliza?’

  ‘My name’s Aliza actually, with an A,’ I said, ‘and I love you.’

  Five

  March 2016

  Leah is even more grumpy than usual, presumably a result of her early start this morning. I make her a sandwich and encourage her to go back to bed. Alex mops up the tea I spilled on the floor, while I make some more. Teamwork. I put his mug in front of him, and we sit at the kitchen table, in our usual places.

  ‘Well, go on then,’ he says, smiling.

  ‘Go on, what?’

  ‘She said you would know what she’d been doing.’ The detective inspector is back.

  ‘Oh, that.’ I stir the teaspoon round in my tea, though I don’t need to; I gave up sugar several years ago. �
�I hope she gets some sleep, otherwise she’s going to be hell to live with all day.’

  ‘Gotta say, Liza, you are acting a bit suspiciously.’ His eyes twinkle at me over the top of his mug, seconds before his reading glasses steam up from bottom to top. He takes them off.

  ‘Look, I don’t know anything for sure,’ I say. ‘It’s only a guess.’

  ‘I’m imagining terrible things involving drugs and underage sex, so I would really like you to share your guess.’

  I take a deep breath. ‘I think maybe she’s been to shul. Synagogue.’

  ‘I know what shul means. Why do you think she’s been there?’ He stops smiling. ‘What did actually happen at Dov’s last night?’

  ‘Nothing! Hardly anything.’

  He waits, and I quickly work out a truncated version to tell him. ‘This is no big deal, OK? Leah was somewhere in the house with the cousins, and Dov, Mum and I were chatting.’

  ‘You mean your mum was chatting, and you and Dov were waiting politely to get a word in.’

  ‘Yes, pretty much. Anyway, Mum mentioned that she’d, uh, seen Nathan’s mother recently.’

  Alex raises his eyebrows – Nathan is not a name we lightly bandy about – and I hurry on: ‘He’s still living in Gateshead. And the big news is that he got married last year.’

  ‘Wow, finally. His mum must be praying her thanks every minute of the day.’

  ‘I expect so.’ I cough. ‘So, well, Mum was doing that thing she does sometimes…’

  ‘Speculating about how much better your life would have been had you stayed with Nathan?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Yes, come on.’

  Well, not how much better, just how different.’

  ‘And then you wonder why I don’t like hanging out with your family.’ Alex gets up. ‘Going to make us some lunch.’

  ‘It’s not all my family. It’s only Mum. And Uri. And maybe Becca.’

  Alex says nothing, has his back to me, getting food out of the fridge.

  ‘It’s not like your family were always massively wonderful,’ I say. ‘Remember when Vicky, for instance—’

  He turns abruptly and snaps, ‘Really not the time, Eliza. Do you think that before Leah comes down, you could get to the point?’

  ‘OK. Well, Mum started reminiscing about the past, you know.’

  ‘The past is generally what people reminisce about.’

  Alex isn’t normally this sarky. ‘Yes, she was going on about our, uh, lost weekend, and what might have happened if I hadn’t been pregnant. Then Dov started hissing, “sssh, sssh,” at Mum, and we all realised that Leah was standing at the door. It might be a good idea to use the eggs. I bought too many.’

  Alex holds up an egg box with a ‘duh’ expression on his face. ‘How much did she hear?’

  ‘I didn’t think she’d heard anything. But back home, she started asking me about it.’

  I don’t tell Alex that she found the fake wedding photo. He doesn’t know I still have it. I was supposed to get rid of it fifteen years ago. I don’t know why I didn’t. I don’t! Psychoanalyse it all you like. Feel free.

  ‘How much did you tell her? Do you want cheese in yours?’

  ‘Yes please. I didn’t say much. I only said, uh, that after we got married,’ and I drop my voice in the hope that no one, including me, can hear, ‘I left you for a short while and went back to my family. And back to Nathan.’

  ‘Not back to him,’ Alex says, in a louder voice than normal, as if to compensate for my quietness. ‘You’d never actually been with him. And you weren’t with him that second time, either. Where’s the virgin olive oil?’

  ‘We’ve run out. There’s the non-virgin stuff in the cupboard.’

  ‘Butter’s better than that shit.’ He heats the pan, drops in a pat of butter. ‘You’d never even kissed him. It wasn’t a real…’

  ‘You sure you want to do this?’ I stand up. ‘Now, after all these years?’

  ‘You’re the one who blew it up again,’ he says. ‘You’re the one who told Leah about it. I don’t know why I’m splitting hairs anyway: I’m sure you kissed him. I expect you did a lot more than kiss him, after you left me.’

  ‘For god’s sake, Alex!’

  Why can’t Leah walk in now, damn her? This would be the perfect moment for her to interrupt.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Alex cracks eggs noisily into a bowl. ‘Two or three eggs?’

  ‘Two please. Al, don’t be mad with me.’ I walk over to him, take the bowl out of his hands, and nuzzle into his neck. ‘You know you’re the only man I’ve ever loved.’

  He puts his arms round me and we stand close together. Into my hair, he whispers, ‘What’s going on, Liza?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I say. ‘Nothing is going on.’

  An unpleasant smell reaches our noses and we break apart.

  ‘Damn it, the butter’s burnt!’

  Leah doesn’t reappear until we’re sitting down to lunch. Alex greets her with a quip about her impeccable timing. She really has been asleep; she has crease marks on her face and hasn’t touched the sandwich. I make her a plain omelette, the only sort she’ll eat, which she grumpily picks at.

  ‘So,’ Alex says brightly, ‘your mother and I have a bet on. She says you’ve been to synagogue. I say you’ve been hanging round the shopping centre. Who’s right?’

  Leah shrugs. ‘Went with Macy to her shul.’

  Alex grins at me. ‘Mum wins!’

  ‘What was it like?’ I ask.

  ‘Dunno.’

  ‘That’s it?’

  ‘The rabbi was weird.’

  ‘How was he weird?’

  ‘She, Mum. Rabbis can be women.’

  ‘Not where your mother comes from, they can’t,’ Alex says. ‘You’ve only gone and found yourself on The Other Side, Leah baby.’

  She looks at him, baffled. ‘What?’

  ‘Was it the progressive synagogue in Barkingside you went to, by any chance?’ he says, openly enjoying this now. I don’t for the moment question how he knows where the local shul is, nor how he knows it’s a progressive shul.

  Leah says, ‘Yeah, I guess.’

  ‘Women rabbis, gay rabbis, I bet they let men and women sit together, right?’

  Leah shrugs. ‘So what?’

  ‘Well, sweetie,’ Alex says, forking a tomato and smirking, there’s no other word for it, smirking at me. ‘Your mum’s lot think that lot are the enemy, you know.’

  ‘We do not think that.’ I don’t like the way this is going. ‘This omelette’s delicious, Alex.’ I don’t want her to…

  ‘I’m going to ask Uncle Dov if I can go to his shul, anyway.’

  Too late. You bloody idiot, Alex.

  ‘Listen, sweetheart,’ I say, knowing it’s hopeless, that whatever I say is going to entrench her more deeply, but unable to not say something. After all, this is my battle, not Alex’s. ‘There are lots of ways we can explore your heritage, if this is something you want to do. You don’t have to do the whole…’

  ‘I want to,’ she says. ‘I’ve always wanted to have a religion and you’ve never let me.’

  ‘Well, that’s not true, I never knew you wanted…’

  ‘Everyone else has one. Macy goes to shul, and Omega goes to this church where they sing, like, gospel songs, and Ethan is a Quaker. I could have easily been properly Jewish. You’ve always acted like I’m not any religion, but if you’d have stayed married to Nathan, you’d have had to bring me up Jewish.’

  ‘Wait, what?’ Alex says. He puts his cutlery down. ‘Stayed married?’

  ‘I saw their wedding photo,’ Leah says, pointing at me. ‘I know everything.’

  ‘No, no, you don’t,’ I start to say, ‘you don’t actually know anything,’ but Alex is staring at me.

  ‘What the bloody hell, Eliza? How could she have seen a wedding photo? You never married Nathan!’ Then it dawns on him. ‘Oh, no. No, no, no. Please, don’t tell me you still have it.’

  Ther
e is a silence.

  ‘AWK-ward,’ Leah sings, and then the doorbell rings. ‘Thank the fuck,’ she says, and runs out to answer it.

  ‘You chucked that photo out,’ Alex says. He pushes his plate away. ‘You told me. Years ago.’

  ‘I’m really sorry. I forgot I had it.’

  ‘You kept it, like an unexploded hand grenade, so it could go off all these years later.’

  ‘Look, Alex. You’re being melodramatic. Nothing’s gone off. The worst thing we could do now is try and make religion taboo. It will only make her want to do it all the more. She’s at that rebellious age.’

  ‘Well, I guess you should know. You were the sine qua non of rebellious daughters,’ Alex says. I can’t tell if he’s being nice, or not.

  Leah comes back in, a boy hovering nervously behind her. I recognise him vaguely as one of the kids in her posse at school. We’re not allowed to call it her posse, of course, but we do amongst ourselves, when she’s not listening.

  ‘Mum, Ethan wants to know if I can go into town with him,’ Leah says. She has her back to the boy, so he can’t see her making an ‘I don’t want to, get me out of this please’ face at me.

  ‘Oh, honey,’ I say, picking up my cue, ‘I’m so sorry but we have to visit your grandma this afternoon.’

  Leah frowns at me – clearly I’ve chosen the wrong excuse – and Ethan says, ‘But you saw her yesterday.’

  Leah turns to face him and says, ‘Yeah well, she’s ill.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry. Well…’ he stops, not knowing how to extricate himself.

  ‘Maybe another day soon?’ I say, and gently steer him out into the hall. Poor boy, with his sagging shoulders, weighed down with unrequited love. I feel sorry for him, and also I see a solution in the puppy-dog eyes that Leah is callously ignoring. As I open the door for him, I whisper, ‘Leah’s not doing anything tomorrow afternoon, if you want to call by then?’

  ‘OK, thanks, yeah, great,’ he mumbles.

  I close the door, and take my time going back into the kitchen. My husband and daughter look at me with different kinds of accusations on their faces.