Love and Other Enchantments

Chapter 1

I sprinkled salt over the salad and looked up at the horizon to the sun as it rolled toward the sea.

I had become accustomed to high-rises, other people’s windows, air conditioners, antennae, solar water heaters, and cranes.

The sight of a clean, unfettered skyline blurred by smudges of water and the sun’s glare was mesmerizing to me.

I’d had plenty of opportunities to contemplate the sea—on vacation, during random hours of recreation, on occasional trips to the beaches of Tel Aviv.

But I was captivated by this now-permanent backdrop to my daily routine.

When the glare burst through the window behind my head in the bathroom mirror—wavy brown hair, foxlike face, green eyes—suddenly, a blue horizon stretched between my curls and the mirror frame like a pet sprawling in the background of a portrait.

I reveled in the fusion of this fresh view into our daily routine, which did not change much with our move from Tel Aviv to Atlit.

Halimi was a creature of habit—something that always surprises people familiar only with his proclivity for clubbing.

He usually wakes up very early in the morning, gets out of bed a few seconds after opening his eyes, and powers up with strong black coffee and two Camel cigarettes.

His brutal morning cough heralds the start of my day.

After Halimi recovers from his hacking fit, he goes out to buy fresh bread rolls.

The rolls are just an excuse. A morning stroll in the fresh air is something he’s been doing since his early teens, whatever the weather—be it the August sun already beating down at eight in the morning or a torrent of December rain, though he hates rain more than cats do.

Even during his long years of partying, he always insisted on leaving the club in the early hours of the morning.

“I love hearing the birds wake up,” he’d say.

Usually, he said this to the girl who happened to be with him at the time, as he offered to treat her to breakfast in some dive.

It was like that with us too. We met in the spring at one of those birthday parties that begins on a Friday afternoon and, depending on human chemistry and the quality of alcohol and drugs and hors d’oeuvres, lasts through Saturday morning.

There’s always someone playing guitar, and someone else holding court with earnest emotion.

The older the crowd, the greater the number of couples with young children in tow, trying in vain to relive their carefree years but facing the fact that they are now grumpy parents trying to control toddlers who clearly skipped their afternoon naps.

I arrived at this particular birthday party with Ronen, my boyfriend at the time, a morose character and a childhood friend of Eran, whose birthday it was.

None of my own crowd was there, aside from Eran and his wife, Hila.

Here and there flashed familiar faces—from the café, the neighborhood, dinner at Eran and Hila’s, from Facebook.

Ronen was a mistake from the beginning. He was the silent type, which attracted me at first since he was the polar opposite of the man I’d dated before him.

Meanwhile, I’d become totally sick of his silences.

For some time, I’d been debating the least stressful way of breaking up with him.

We argued constantly, including right before we left for the party.

We were in my bedroom. He wanted me to wear a leather miniskirt, but his very insistence made me go for a long skirt and high-necked shirt instead.

“You look like a nun,” he’d said with distaste, and from that moment on we didn’t have a civil word to say to each other.

Shortly after arriving at Eran and Hila’s palatial rooftop, we went our separate ways.

Ronen wrapped himself in silence like a cloak, nursing a bottle of beer and drinking from it in small, annoying sips.

I went off to chat with Hila while Ronen lay down on one of the swanky daybeds as though dead, his dark tea-shade sunglasses deterring any eye contact.

While I was chatting with Hila, I noticed Halimi giving me looks from the lounger he was sprawled across, his long limbs stretched out every which way.

Back then I didn’t know he was blind as a bat and, for some insane reason, avoided eyeglasses and contact lenses.

The look I interpreted as bold was, in fact, a result of the fact that his world was a blur beyond a radius of three feet.

I knew who Halimi was. There had been a bit of an uproar when he was appointed chief editor of a popular women’s magazine; rumor had it he was a womanizer.

He had a long nose, a wide forehead, and a pointed chin, while his lips were narrow and his cheeks sunken—by no means your classic heartthrob, but I’d seen women of all ages lose their cool in his presence.

I often worked in a corner of the café where he hung out in the mornings, and more than once I looked up from my old laptop to see a woman throw her head back in laughter at something Halimi had said.

Halimi, for his part, couldn’t see me clearly while I chatted with Hila, but he had a radar that he’d perfected through years of trial and error.

He noticed the way I held myself (“It seemed so graceful to me, the way you moved your head and hands,” he told me later) and could tell immediately that I was checking him out.

He didn’t see himself as a womanizer, but more like an old-fashioned, intrepid explorer.

He was a true Casanova in his love for women—he didn’t have specific tastes or fixed preferences.

He could get turned on by women much younger than him, older than him, thin ones, thick ones, neurotic or stoic, impetuous or inhibited, flirty or hard to get.

Crying didn’t inhibit him; sometimes it even turned him on.

He frequently got involved with women whose lives were already bursting at the seams—a husband, kids, a career.

In short, any woman who crossed paths with him and who aroused the slightest spark of interest became uncharted territory on his life’s map of conquests.

All that I understood much later.

Hila, perceptive as ever, immediately noticed the looks we were giving each other. “Do you know him?” she asked, waving Halimi over with a smile.

He smiled back and gestured with his hands, “Come over here.”

“Wait,” Hila motioned to him, her thumb and forefinger pressed together.

“Just in passing,” I said. “Sometimes I see him at the café.”

“Okay, well, if you want a hookup, he’s your man.

” Hila loathed Ronen but was fond of me.

She knew our relationship was on the rocks and clearly wasn’t shy about introducing me to someone else.

It always amused me, and this time I felt an almost physical urge to dive into an adventure, as insignificant as it might be, just to bug Ronen.

“He likes to fill the role of”—Hila’s eyes wandered, as if she were trying to capture the precise phrase—“momentary fantasy.” She gave me a salacious look and added, “He’s also got a weakness for women who are already taken.

” She told me of Halimi’s talent for dipping into women’s lives, making them feel hot and wanted.

When he was done, Halimi would disappear in a cloud of debris, sometimes trying to make amends by running a flattering story about them in the magazine or signing off on a reference for a lucrative job.

She rattled off a list of names borne on the wings of Tel Aviv gossip, and I restrained myself from asking her if her name was also on that list.

Halimi kept staring at us, holding a cigarette in one hand and a glass of whiskey in the other. I was almost positive he knew what we were talking about, and I felt my cheeks burn.

“I need a cigarette,” I said suddenly. Hila pulled out a pouch of rolling tobacco for me, but I shook my head. “A real cigarette,” I said. I flashed her a smile and walked over to Halimi.

Halimi straightened up, feigning surprise.

“Can I borrow a cigarette?” I asked, my heart pounding a little faster than usual.

He vaguely recognized me, telling me later that he’d noticed the “cute lady” buried in her laptop at the café most days.

Sometimes we nodded to each other, and once I asked him for a light.

He claimed to remember this because he’d noticed my green eyes—but somehow, he had never hit on me before.

“Borrow?” he smirked, scratching his cheek.

“Sure, you can borrow one. But only if you return it with interest.” His speech was nasal, but there was something captivating about it.

He elongated certain vowels with a pronounced sluggishness, and it was obvious he had a fetish for words.

“They’re Camels,” he warned me, pulling out a crumpled pack from the pocket of his skinny jeans.

“My favorite,” I said.

The sun had already set, and the golden patches that mottled the fortress of Atlit dissipated into shadows.

I added olive oil to the salad, removed slices of toast from the toaster, and went out into the yard.

Lily, hair pale and unkempt, cheeks flushed, sat on the blue plastic swing we’d tied to one of the boughs of the big Persian lilac tree.

Her legs hung between the safety bars, and she swayed backward and forward in the light breeze.

Halimi sat by her side on a chair he’d dragged over from the deck and fiddled with his phone.

“Dinner’s ready,” I said quietly. Halimi jumped, startled, and his guilty smile immediately hardened my jaw. Son of a bitch, I said to myself, careful not to reveal my annoyance. Halimi assumed a serious expression, which was a novelty. I ignored him and went over to Lily.

I picked her up off the swing and embraced her warm little body. The evening breeze turned cool, making me shiver in my shirt.

“Mommy,” Lily said, trying to grab my eyelashes. “Why do you have eyes?”

I smiled at her and said, “That’s quite a question.”

Halimi slipped his phone into his pocket. “Diti, quit being so suspicious, it’s nonsense.” He walked over and hugged me from behind.

“Life is mostly nonsense,” I answered, my body unyielding. “It’s just that I thought you might lay off your nonsense for a couple of weeks out of respect for our new life.” I spat out the words new life in a mocking tone.

Halimi moved away and took a deep breath—the kind meant to convey patience but that actually conveyed a complete lack of it.

I wanted to cry. All the afternoon tenderness, the sunset, and the tingling memories, all of it dissolved in the evening chill.

“Idit, don’t act like an idiot,” Halimi said, in an icier tone than he probably intended, which depressed me even more.

I knew what he was up to, and he knew I knew.

He didn’t bother apologizing or try to make it up to me; he assumed a combat position.

We’d had this “you make the rules” and “but you didn’t exactly follow them” conversation a thousand times.

A thousand times I swore to myself that I’d play his game, and a thousand times I realized that there were no winners in this game.