Housebroken (19 page)

I never thought I would be that kind of woman, an accusing, hysterical woman who put her hands on her hips when she made her accusations, but as I stood opposite Nathan sitting on the sofa, mumbling to the floor, my hands suddenly landed on my hips and stuck there. I felt as if I'd grown little wings that would help me to take the fight to some other place, higher and more civilized. That's how I felt when I stood in the middle of the room with my hands on my hips and tried to save our relationship.

We stood on the balcony and looked at the street. I asked if I should cut up a watermelon and Nathan nodded. I went into the kitchen and took the watermelon out of the fridge. I cut it in half and cut one half into cubes and arranged them on a plate and stuck two forks into the top two cubes. I picked out a sweet watermelon this time, and I saw it as a good sign, because I didn't know how people were supposed to feel after a fight. It was our first and last fight. I put the plate down on the ledge, between us, and we ate in silence and went on looking at the street, and then he turned my attention to the palm tree and its burdens.

He pointed to the tree with his fork and with his mouth full of juice he said: “It's about time those dates were stripped from that tree.”

I asked why and he said that they were weighing it down.

I didn't want to talk about the tree. I wanted to talk about our relationship. But I'd already said everything I had to say a few minutes before, and now I was standing on the balcony and eating watermelon and having a polite conversation and feeling sorry for a tree and knowing that it was all over.

He said: “If the dates aren't removed, the tree will die.”

I asked: “So what should we do?”

And he said: “Nothing. There's nothing we can do.”

The plate was emptied and I took it back to the kitchen. I put it in the sink and turned the water on and let it run and in the meantime I tried to think quickly about what to do next, if there was anything it was possible to do. When I returned to the balcony Nathan was already standing with his back to the street, one knee bent and his shoe resting on the stone ledge, crumbling dry geranium leaves he had picked from the flowerpot between his fingers.

I asked if I should cut up more watermelon and he said no. I knew that these were our last moments together and I wanted to buy time. I said it was no problem, that there was a lot more, another whole half, and he said that he already had enough and he thinks he's going to leave now. I asked if this was it, if he was leaving, and he said yes. He stood a minute longer with his big shoe resting on the ledge and said: “I think I better go now.” I said: “Yes.” He threw the handful of geranium flakes into the street and rubbed his palms together and took his foot down and said: “I'm leaving.” I thought: The last thing we did together was eat watermelon.

At the door he said he was sorry. He said he was sorry it had to be this way and I said he didn't leave me any choice. He put his hand on my shoulder and said he didn't understand why it had to be this way and I said there was no alternative. He said again that he was sorry and took his hand off my shoulder and slid his fingers down my arm and looked at me sadly. I closed the door behind him and when I turned the key in the lock I heard his heavy steps going down the stairs and then the intercom door slam shut. I went into the kitchen and saw the half watermelon on the marble counter, wrapped it in a plastic bag, and put it in the fridge and I knew that in a few days I would take it out again, still wrapped in the plastic, and throw it away.

Then I went out onto the balcony. I stood and leaned against the ledge and stared at the street, which looked completely different from the way it looked a few minutes ago, though nothing in it had changed. I looked at the cars turning into the street and disappearing around the corner and at the building opposite with the balconies and open windows and I looked at the palm tree and then the birds arrived. They darkened the sky, came down to perch on the TV antennas and the treetops, and screeched excitedly, sending commands to one another, and then they massed in black bodies on the palm tree and pecked at the dates with hammerlike pecks until they polished them off.

They vanished suddenly and it was impossible to tell if the tree was relieved. The dry, yellow boughs didn't rise, grateful and liberated, and the stooping trunk didn't straighten up after the birds had gang-raped it, hysterically flapping their wings. I was sorry Nathan didn't see it. I was sorry it happened a few minutes after he left. I went inside, closed the shutters and the windows and the balcony door, and said to myself: It's over. I made a clean break. Then I lay down on the sofa and started crying. The phone rang and I didn't pick it up. I counted four rings and the machine answered. My parents invited me to come for lunch on Saturday.

2

I met Nathan at a Purim costume party last year. He was wearing a clown's hat on his head. It wasn't one of the cardboard cones you can buy in a toy shop, but a real jester's cap made of different-colored pieces of cloth, crowned by horns stuffed with some soft material with silver bells sewn onto their tips. It was touching and childish.

I wasn't wearing a costume, because I couldn't imagine anything I really wanted to be that evening, except happier. I was thirty and I wanted to be in love and I wanted self-confidence and peace of mind, and I wanted a home. I assumed that the perfect costume for a woman who had all these things was to go as she was, so in a way you could say that I was wearing a costume.

My last one was a failure. I was five years old and I dressed up as Queen Esther. There were characters I liked better than Queen Esther, who always seemed too biblical and boring to me, but on the other hand I wanted to be like everybody else.

The dress was okay, layers of rustling white satin which I wore over white woolen tights, but there was a problem with the royal shoes. I wanted glass slippers, but my mother, who like a veteran traffic policeman knew how to direct my fantasies into roads that were clear that morning, explained that I had mixed things up. Glass slippers belonged to the story of Cinderella, she said. Queen Esther wore ordinary queen's shoes. I said: “But why can't we buy two bottles of soda and break them in half and I'll go to kindergarten in them?” And she said: “Because it's dangerous and impossible.” I said: “But nobody else will have shoes like them.” She said: “You don't need what nobody else has. You need what everybody has.” I said: “But I'll be the most beautiful.” And she said: “Queen Esther wasn't beautiful. Cinderella was beautiful,” and relying on my short memory she promised: “Next year you can go as Cinderella.”

This sounded logical to me, and since I was the last child in the world who would want to get her fairy tales confused, I proudly put on my sandals, whose straps my mother had covered with silver foil. But that morning it rained cats and dogs—one of the usual disasters that strike children on Purim—and on the way to kindergarten, while my mother held my hand and assured me that everything would be all right and said that it was a pity that at my tender age I should be so sad and sulky, like my father, I stepped in a puddle and the silver foil came off my left sandal. I have a black-and-white photo in my album in which I'm standing and holding up the hem of my dress with my fingers, one sandal regal and the other not, and accordingly, a half smile on my face.

It didn't rain on Purim last year. It was a clear, cold night and I drove to the party in my car. I was wearing a black sweater and jeans and boots. I liked the confident tapping sound they made on the floor. A friend who knew the hosts was supposed to meet me there. I walked into the noisy apartment and looked for her. She said that she'd be dressed as a fairy. I saw a lot of fairies there, but my friend wasn't among them. I went into the kitchen and looked at the rows of beer bottles perspiring on the counter. In the music playing in the living room I heard the soft, intermittent tinkling of bells. I took a bottle and opened it with the bottle opener tied to the handle of the door of the fridge with a long pink ribbon of the kind used to decorate gifts. The bottle opener was disguised too. Someone had covered it with shiny stickers shaped like stars and crescent moons.

The kitchen was crowded with two fairies, a Superman, a Queen Esther, and a tall bald man wearing a cat's mask. I said to myself that if my fairy didn't show up in fifteen minutes, I was going home. I hated parties. They intensified all the feelings that parties are supposed to expel. I thought of pouring the rest of my beer down the sink and leaving, but then I heard the tinkling of the bells coming closer. The clown came into the kitchen looking for the bottle opener.

He was very tall and he had blue eyes, and whenever he moved his head there was a soft tinkling sound. He opened himself a beer, leaned against the counter next to me, and took big gulps from the bottle, staring at the dark living room with a bored expression on his face. I looked at his cap, at the horns bending over his forehead and his ears and tinkling softly. He looked as if he had put the cap on years ago and felt so comfortable in it that he forgot it was there.

The loud music was suddenly replaced by a children's song. The hosts were playing “Little clown, full of glee, you dance with everybody,” and the dancers were adjusting their steps to the simple tune and words. They hopped up and down and made questioning gestures with their hands, and cocked their heads from side to side at the “Won't you” of “Won't you dance with me?”

“Would you like to dance?” asked the clown.

I nodded and put my beer down on the counter and followed him into the living room, to a little clearing in the crowd. I found it difficult to perform childish steps in front of a stranger, but the clown skipped and hopped opposite me with a naturalness that seemed almost cynical. He twirled his hands and cocked his big head from side to side, and at the “Won't you” shrugged his shoulders stubbornly. The other dancers looked at us—at the clown shrugging his shoulders and ringing his bells, and at me, treading on the spot and smiling a half smile. He wasn't pretending to dance like a child. That was the way he danced.

I was attracted to him immediately. I was attracted to him even before I saw him. At first I was attracted to the sound of the bells and then I was attracted to the dance which took me back twenty-five years, to that rainy Purim, to the big roomful of children, steeped in the smell of mud and damp poppy-seed cakes and urine, and the strains of this same song, reverberating an awful disappointment. “She cried all morning,” the kindergarten teacher told my mother when she came to pick me up at noon. “I didn't know what to do with her, Mrs. Lieberman,” she said. “She took off her sandals and sat in the corner. I begged her to put them on and come and dance with the other children, but she only pouted and shrugged her shoulders. I wouldn't let her walk around in her stockings. It's cold today, Mrs. Lieberman. What could I do?”

The song ended and we stood facing each other for a moment and I didn't know what to do. The clown looked abandoned and betrayed; even his cap looked as if it had suddenly wilted. Without a word, he turned his back to me and walked heavily back to the kitchen.

Again we stood leaning against the counter. He introduced himself and said: “Nathan.” I said: “Maya,” and he said it was a pretty name. “So is Nathan,” I said. And he said: “You think so? Actually, I don't like my name.” I asked him why, but he only shrugged his shoulders. My eyes were still looking for my friend the fairy, but I didn't care anymore if she came or not. Another Queen Esther arrived instead, and a tiger with red hair, which matched the color of the stripes on her costume, with a long tail bouncing behind her. They embraced Nathan, and he opened beers for them with the costumed bottle opener and then left to dance with them. He didn't say excuse me, or I'll be right back, or see you later.

I watched him dancing with the tiger and the Queen Esther, and thought that it was time to go home. I thought of my bed and the weekend papers strewn over it. I thought of my apartment, of the bathroom, of its moldy smell in winter when the windows are closed, and the damp towels, I thought of my toothbrush, which was old and needed replacing, and I thought of the stained mirror above the sink, and the way from the bathroom to the bedroom, feet shuffling in socks and hand groping along the wall to turn off the lights: the toilet, the light in the bathroom, the fluorescent light in the kitchen, and last the light in the hallway, until only one light remained on—the reading lamp next to the bed which cast a yellow spotlight on my pillow.

I went downstairs and got into my car. I warmed up the engine and melted the vapors on the windshield. When I drove out of the parking space, I looked in the mirror and saw him coming out of the building. I waited for the huge figure in the blue parka to get into a car, but the clown passed my car and the other cars and went on walking with broad strides toward the main road. He stood there for a minute, my headlights illuminating him, the jester's cap on his head and his hands in his pockets. I honked my horn, a short, hoarse honk, and he turned around, surprised. Despite the closed windows, and the humming of the engine in neutral, and my heart beating in anticipation and self-reproach, I could hear the bells coming closer.

He came up to the car, bent down, and stared inside, looking for the faceless honker. I opened the window and asked him if he didn't have a car. “No,” he said. “Are you going to get a cab?” “I don't know,” he said. “Do you want a ride?” I asked. This was the first time in my life I had offered a strange man a ride, but I thought that someone dressed as a clown couldn't be dangerous. He didn't say a word, went around to the door on the passenger's side, opened it, and squeezed into the seat next to me. The cap got squashed against the ceiling of the car and he took it off and held it rolled up between his hands. I noticed he was going bald. As if he too had only just noticed it, he touched his head apologetically.