Chapter 18
I have to fuck someone to save my marriage.
This was repeating in my head as I wandered the streets of Tel Aviv after my fight with Halimi about everyone at the magazine knowing of his affair with Nina.
The wind was blowing, lifting leaves and dust into the air.
Usually, autumn heralded the return of life to Tel Aviv, but this autumn cooled slowly and would not satisfy my yearning for rain.
It had been several hours, but I did not respond to Halimi’s phone calls or text messages until he stopped trying.
Let him suffocate with Nina and Lana Del Rey and all of Free to Be, where they’re probably taking bets on the chances of Halimi and me splitting up.
Someone to fuck, but who? Who? I had not taken any phone numbers from my little nightclub adventures.
I was cold, and I went into a rundown bar on Bograshov.
I ordered a shot of vodka and a Coke on the side, then another shot.
A group of American men sat at one of the tables inside, noisily drinking beer.
I scanned them out of the corner of my eye to assess if there might be a worthy candidate among them to save my marriage.
After the second shot, the sight of their overgrown, infantile bodies, the pastel colors of their clothes, their light hair and cheerful noise made me ill.
I ordered another shot. I looked the barman over.
He had bad teeth and thin hair. He also seemed exhausted and did not look at me when he served the shots.
In the corner sat a man probably some twenty years older than me, staring sadly at his big glass of beer.
I took out my phone. I looked through Halimi’s messages with apathy: “Ditush, please get back to me,” “Ditush, just please don’t do anything too stupid.
” I wondered, with detachment, what he would consider too stupid at this point.
I began to scroll through Nina’s profiles—until I came across a flattering selfie of her in bed, her thick hair spread luxuriantly over a purple satin pillow with the prominent logo of some textile company that she also bothered to tag. Influence queen.
I went through my contacts. I stopped at our electrician, who was not bad-looking and always flirted with me. I opened WhatsApp and thought about writing him a message. I had no idea what his romantic status was, and I hadn’t seen him in more than six months. I went back to my contacts list.
I had nearly reached the end when I got to Ronen, the guy I had abandoned without a hint of remorse in favor of Halimi, back at that roof party thrown by Hila and her ex-husband.
Ronen was online. The quiet Ronen, the wannabe hipster whom I dated for maybe three months.
I had seen him three or four times since then, and both of us were courteous.
We had occasionally liked each other’s Facebook posts about various social or political matters.
I tried to remember our first dates. He had the dry, measured sense of humor of a fundamentally grumpy person, which captivated me, initially.
I went into his Facebook profile. Sparse, mostly posts of articles from alternative media sources.
I went through the few pictures, which were virtually all tags of him at other people’s parties.
Then, I quickly went to Twitter to read his tweets from recent months.
More active than on Facebook, that’s for sure, and he even had a few funny tweets, deciphering street signs, that kind of nonsense.
I had the feeling that he was single. The vodka made me feel reckless, and I went back to WhatsApp.
He was still online. Without pause, I texted, “Hey, what’s up?
” The message was read within several seconds. Pause. Ronen is typing …
“Fine.” Smiley with glasses emoji. “How are you?”
“Not great,” I replied at once. “Want to meet up?”
Ronen is typing …
“In bed already,” he wrote finally. “It’s gross out. Want to come by?”
“Where do you live these days?” I typed quickly. I signaled to the barman that I wanted the bill. A booming laugh came from the group of young Americans. The sad old guy in the corner looked up from his beer with a start.
“Corner of Pinsker and Bograshov,” Ronen wrote. I got off the barstool, swaying slightly, and even laughed to myself. “On my way,” I messaged.
“Won’t you miss me terribly?” Halimi asked. We were lying on the couch, me after a smoke on the balcony and him after bathing Lily and putting her to bed. I didn’t feel like watching anything on TV.
“Terribly,” I smiled and laid my head on his chest. He was supposed to go in two days, and I tried to look like someone who was not counting the hours.
Not that I was suffering his presence—on the contrary.
The whole week until he left, in the mornings after Lily went off to preschool, we were swept up into loud sex, and in the evenings, we chatted endlessly and laughed a lot.
I noticed that Halimi and I were enjoying each other with an intensity that could only be compared to our first year together.
I did not try to analyze this with him. I simply enjoyed Halimi’s brilliant mind, his sharp and sarcastic comments about the things that we saw, that were happening in the world, and the heightened sexual desire, both mine and his.
“Mama, put on a dress,” Lily had said earlier at dinner.
I did not ask why and just smiled at her.
I was in a house dress anyway, but she must have meant her favorite dress, which I only wore on festive occasions: a frock with black velvet on top and a chiffon skirt that I had to model for her at least once every few days.
“We have the most beautiful mama in the world, right, Loosh?” said Halimi. “With or without the dress,” he added. I slapped him, and we laughed. Lily was ecstatic over the slap and wanted to slap both of us all evening.
“What do you love to do most?” I asked her in the bath, taking a video on Halimi’s smartphone.
“To slap!” Lily roared and splashed wildly.
I burst out laughing, and Halimi’s phone nearly fell into the water.
Everything was documented, including my perfect rescue, and in the evening, after Lily fell asleep, we watched it maybe seven times in a row. Halimi sent the video to his mother.
The knowledge that in just a few days, an entire week of solitary independence awaited me—a week in which I would be answerable only to myself, with no schedule but the one I chose, and free to visit Jean and be with him without the pressure to hurry home—filled my heart with pure delight.
This was more than just time off: I hadn’t been alone for more than a single day in years.
The excitement that I would have a whole week to myself also caused me bursts of tenderness and a kind of advance longing for both Lily and Halimi.
Every day, we took her straight from preschool to the sea, and we basked in the spring sun and played in the waves for hours.
I told my parents and Halimi that I would be going to a Vipassana retreat so would not be available most of the time, but I would check messages every now and then.
“Vipassana, huh?” Halimi replied, narrowing his eyes in amusement when I told him this.
I had just come home from a yoga class. We had meditated in the studio, and I felt so good that nothing could pierce my euphoria.
I registered and paid for the workshop on the association’s website, so that the charge would appear on the card.
“It’ll be good for me to be quiet for a bit, I think,” I said and held back an inappropriate giggle.
“With dozens of strangers, definitely,” Halimi agreed, also amused.
“It really does sound interesting to me,” I said honestly.
Did he sense anything? It was impossible to know with Halimi.
And I didn’t care. He was also in the best mood I had seen him in since the Nina thing blew up.
He would look up at me suddenly from his phone or from the book he was reading and smile.
When we were at the beach, which could be pretty stormy this time of year, Halimi ran into the waves and swam out far but still had energy for Lily afterward, spending a long time with her in the shallow water.
He built castles with her and took long walks to look for shells and stones and crabs, while I lay on the beach mat, ignoring the ruins of the fortress.
When I did focus my gaze there, the walls that once surrounded it rose up in my mind’s eye, and the towers appeared in the air, and I could almost hear the voices from the town.
I wanted to keep things separate, so I tried not to look for too long.
Sometimes, in the distance, I noticed waterfowl flying over and into the salt ponds.
Here and there, I spotted a pink flash of a flamingo, one of the last to linger into the summer migration, and I’d shout over to Halimi and Lily, “Look, look!”
“Well?” Ronen asked, in the tone of “What brings you here?” He was in sweatpants and a T-shirt, and it was clear that he really had intended to go to sleep already (Good God, at ten thirty, I thought as I entered his sad apartment, which was almost entirely dark, illuminated only by the light of a small lamp in the living room.)
“I thought of you suddenly,” I said, clearly embarrassed.
I took off my coat but held it on my knees, ready to escape.
Ronen did not offer me anything to drink.
I was still a little unstable after my shots at the bar.
As I walked from Bograshov Street to Ronen’s apartment, I had imagined myself telling him, “I am looking to get fucked because I need to save my marriage, are you able to help me?” But now, it did not seem fitting at all.
Ronen no longer had his trendy little beard, but his hair was actually longer, like a teenager whom nobody could force to get a haircut.
There was something slightly attractive about him and the relaxed indifference with which he looked at me.
I remembered that sex with him was not particularly good.
I desperately wanted a cigarette, but it did not look like a smoker’s house.
“You have a daughter, no?” he asked suddenly.
“Yes,” I replied mechanically. “She’s with her dad.” People always acted like it was some kind of phenomenon worth investigating, a mom out of the house at night. Usually it didn’t bother me, but I thought I heard a moralizing tone.
“So, you came for … ?” I knew that he meant to ask clearly if I had come to sleep with him, but evidently he, too, had lost his assertiveness mid-sentence. It made me sad that I was so transparent. Any hint of desire completely disappeared in that moment.
“Yes,” I said and got up. “Sorry. And sorry that I was rude to you at that party when we separated.”
“Separated,” Ronen snorted. “Maybe it would come full circle if we screwed now,” he added, looking me up and down, almost expressionless. Screwed, I thought to myself. Ew.
“But it isn’t quite right, is it?” I said, holding my jacket closer. “Right?”
“Not really, no,” said Ronen, wrinkling his nose.