Girl Unwrapped (25 page)

One evening, David shouts into the house, “Goldblatt, get your ass out here.”

A bottle of arak, glass tumblers, and dishes of snacks cover the wicker table in the centre of the garden. The candles flicker in the clay lanterns that hang from the tree. It’s party time, a final blow-out to bid goodbye to Janet and wish her well in her new life in the gritty, party town of Tel Aviv. David raises his glass in a toast: to Janet, to freedom, to life. Janet, wearing a dazed smile, chugs back her drink.

“We’ll miss her, won’t we?” says David, shooting Toni a look of keen insight. “But when you love someone, you’ve got to let her go.”

Toni gulps from her glass. Arak and water, a milky mixture, deceptively smooth. It numbs sadness as it fires the belly.

Although the fierce heat of an August day has abated, the air still feels clotted and nothing stirs—not a leaf, not a withered blade of grass. It is one of those nights when people drag mattresses onto their roofs, complaining they can’t draw a proper breath indoors. From the top of the garden wall a feral cat yowls, and the sound is like a distillation of all the longing in the world. David throws his head back to produce a startlingly realistic imitation. Janet offers her own rendition, her lips puckered into a tremulous “O.” Toni falls off her stool to collapse in hysterics at Janet’s feet. Just like old times. Tomorrow is a mirage. Only now exists.

They drink and eat and smoke and
kibbitz
. Then Janet jumps up, teeters a moment, and executes a shuffling dance-step toward the shed whose doors stand open, revealing the deeper darkness inside.

“I wanna listen to some music, you guys. Something groooovy.”

“I’ve got just the ticket,” David says, flashing his teeth in a swashbuckler’s smile. “Guy I met the other day gave me an album of a California band. Far out stuff. Where d’you think you’re going, Goldblatt? Party’s not over yet.”

Gathering Janet and Toni in a wide embrace, he ushers them both over the threshold of the room. He switches on a small lamp whose shade is draped with a crimson shawl so that the light cast is a soft, lurid glow. He squats and rummages through the records spilled around their portable record player, there’s a crackle of static as he drops the needle into place, and then the room fills with the most outlandish sound. Electric guitars squeal and groan, drums crash, the tempo is erratic, fast to slow to one high-pitched note pulled out like a scream. David stands in the middle of the room and starts to sway.

“Acid rock. The real trip.”

He punches a fist in the air as he dances, his black hair swishing back and forth over his face. Janet watches a moment, then steps forward with a defiant grunt. Her limbs hang loose, she shakes, shimmies, flings herself about, competing with David in the game of wild abandon.

“Come on, girl. Get in the groove.”

David pulls Toni into the circle. After a few faltering steps she becomes accustomed to the screeching, discordant music. It has penetrated her entire body. She becomes the yowl, the shriek, the shudder of the instruments, though she’s nowhere near as loose as the other two. Still, they’re all connected, energized by one another and the unearthly electronic sounds. Drops of sweat fly from David’s forehead. He strips off his shirt and clasps his hands behind his head, displaying his lean, tanned chest. Janet meets his eye and pulls off her own top, then her bra, tossing the garments behind her into a corner. All she wears now are her shorts and a string of glass beads that swings one way as her bare breasts, startling white against a ruddy tan, swing the other. The beads clack together like snapping teeth.

Toni drops her eyes, lifts them again, unable to stop staring at the wild, passionate, essential Janet. She takes a panicked step toward the open door. Suddenly there’s not enough air in the room. Her heart pounds like a crazed animal. A stifled shriek escapes from behind her clenched teeth.

“She’s freaking out,” David says in the steady voice of a doctor delivering a diagnosis. Janet stares blankly while David grasps Toni’s arms, gently pushing her toward the mattress on the floor. This takes an eternity, the long journey backward, step by step, until the edge of the mattress bumps against her ankles and she collapses under David’s weight. His strong hands grip her shoulders, forcing her to lie still. The ceiling spins, the walls squeeze inward, sweat trickles down her sides. She’s crying now, with hard, dry sobs that wrack her breast.

“Easy, easy,” David purrs, then to Janet, “Get over here. Hold her hand. She’s really freaking out.”

Obediently, the half-naked Janet comes to sit on the other side of the mattress, leaning over Toni and crooning “Easy, easy,” adopting David’s tone while she limply holds Toni’s hand in her own. Through her tears Toni sees Janet’s bewildered face framed by a mass of frizzled hair. Two blobs of mascara run from the corners of Janet’s eyes. The San Francisco band still screams from the record player.

“What is it, girl? What’s bugging you? Let it out.” David coaxes, his American-accented “out” sounding like a sympathetic “ow.”

“I want … I want … ” Toni moans, surprised to hear herself, because it’s not her, it’s some trapped creature calling from the depths.

“Go ahead. Say it,” David urges. He massages her right palm with his strong thumb while his glowing eyes fix on hers. “You’ve been bottling up your feelings for so long, haven’t you, little girl? I know. We know, don’t we, Janet? It’s okay. Let it flow.”

Abruptly Toni’s tears stop. The feeling of being seized by the throat is back. David turns to Janet.

“Kiss her.”

Janet regards him open-mouthed. She’s drunker than Toni realized. Her face wears a bleary, unfocussed expression. But to Toni’s surprise, Janet leans forward and kisses her, a quick, light brushing of the lips. The cool glass beads tickle Toni’s neck. She’s too astonished to say a word.

“You call that a kiss? That prissy little thing? Come on, Janet, do it right,” David sneers. “Don’t be such a prude.”

“What’s going on, David?” Janet asks slowly, a suspicious look dawning on her face. She sits up, arms crossed over her naked chest. “What are you doing?”

“I’m trying to help our little friend here. Have a heart. She’s a virgin, for Chrissake.” He says this as if virginity were an affliction. Toni tries to struggle off the bed, but David wraps his arms around her from behind, as if she were a mental patient to be subdued.

“Easy, easy, girl. Trust me.”

Janet looks past Toni, fixing David with a hurt and hostile look.

“Leave her alone. This isn’t funny.”

“That’s right. It isn’t. There’s a tortured soul here. All closed up like a fist. She needs you, Janet. Loosen up.” David sounds genuinely mournful, as if he himself were the lovelorn supplicant. Toni stops struggling and looks for Janet’s answer, wondering despite herself, what if? What if Janet could be persuaded to kiss her properly?

“Come on,” he urges.

Janet chews her lips, and her eyes dart from Toni to David. Then her face hardens and her fist swings wildly. She misses him and clips Toni smartly on the ear.

“You pig.”

“That’s not very nice, Janet,” David, says releasing Toni. “You hurt our little friend.”

“And suppose we get off on each other, eh?” Janet shouts. “What if we decide to leave you out? Zee two vimmen, zey are so beautiful together! Ooh-la-la!” she says. “So what do we need you for?”

And before he can respond, she rises up on her knees and kisses Toni again, harder, more deliberate this time, trembling with anger, her chin colliding with Toni’s. Yet her lips are soft as rose petals, as Toni always imagined they would be. When the kiss is over, Toni falls backward. From the far corner of the room comes the shrill wail of an electric guitar being fingered on the high notes.

“Cool. You chicks go for it. I’m already gone.”

David rolls off the bed to rummage on the floor for his shirt. “I wasn’t angling for anything,” he adds in an aggrieved tone. “You’ve got a petty streak in you, Janet. I just want us all to be happy. Free of hang-ups.”

Standing above them now, his shirt hooked on his forefinger and hanging over his shoulder, he addresses himself to Toni.

“You’re not going to chicken out, now, are you? You’ve got to act. You can’t just dream.”

Looking from him to Janet, seeing Janet stiffen, Toni lunges forward like someone trying to grab a prize at the same time she realizes it’s all wrong, insane. But her body is already in motion. Before she can stop herself, she plants a sloppy kiss on Janet’s lips. No, not her lips. The side of her mouth. Janet wipes her face with the back of her hand and regards Toni in frosty silence. Suddenly they are back at camp, in that other crazy moment of drunken collision. Leaping to her feet, Janet snatches the scarlet shawl draped over the lampshade, wraps it around her bare shoulders, and stomps from the room. Her back retreats across the garden. She yanks open the back door to the main house and shuts it firmly behind her. David shrugs, a gesture that says,
Hey, I tried, didn’t I, didn’t I try my best?
The lamp, robbed of its fine, red-cloth covering, reveals a plain, parchment-coloured shade, scorched on one side. The light cast is harsh and cold, exposing the ugliness of the topsy-turvy room. The San Francisco band continues to grind out another variation of its plaintive, cacophonous howl.

Janet has slept on Toni’s couch in the living room. David has withdrawn to the garden with a blanket and pillow (but not before he first cocked his head to Toni in invitation and grinned at her appalled rebuff). Toni has the turquoise room to herself. Mercifully, much of the night is gone. For a while she sinks into stunned sleep, wakes to a raging thirst and needlepoints of sunlight poking through the slits of the metal doors. She’s trapped in a dream.
How did I get here, how do I get
out?
The turquoise-painted walls have turned a sickly colour, like the powdery bloom of bread mould. Despite her pounding head, she hurries into the house to kneel beside Janet’s blanket-wrapped figure on the couch. The eyelids flutter open, revealing red and teary eyes. They shut again quickly.

“Janet, I’m sorry.”

Empty, used-up words.

Janet’s hair is a bird’s nest tangle. Smudges of makeup linger on her pale cheek. Yet she appears particularly beautiful now, concentrating with all her might on some private place inside herself, her fine bones showing beneath her skin. And merely witnessing this seems another transgression.

“Goodbye,” Toni says, stepping backward.

Janet remains tense beneath her sheet with her eyes squeezed shut. It’s clear she has no intention of opening them again until Toni has taken her sorry, unwanted self away.

chapter 19

She has to laugh at the name: Hotel Vienna. There’s nothing remotely Viennese about this dingy room with the cracked, smoke-grimed ceiling, the tattered bedspread complete with cigarette burn-holes she can put her thumb through, the drunkenly tilted wardrobe, the naked walls, and dusty floor. A faded sign above the hotel entrance, tucked away on a side-street off Jaffa Road, beckons to transients and lowlifes with little money and fewer expectations. Down the hall is a shared bathroom that reeks of urine and Flit bug spray. In the alley below, cats hiss and fight over scraps of garbage. But all this ugliness soothes in a way. Like a “fuck you” scrawled on a wall.

Lying atop the bedspread in the stillness of the morning, Toni takes perverse satisfaction in her surroundings.
Look at you, insect! You got
what you deserve.

The hotel room’s squalor is partly her own. She has contributed scattered unwashed clothes and remnants of take-out meals. Her stale smells mingle with those of her predecessors. The one bright spot is the forty-ounce bottle of Stock brandy on the windowsill. She’s saving that for tomorrow when downtown becomes deserted for the Sabbath and there’s nothing else to do.

Gradually the city awakens. Traffic rumbles, feet hurry across the pavement, metal shutters over shops rattle open, newsboys call out the name of a local paper:
Ha’aretz! Ha’aretz!
She pulls on some clothes and slips downstairs into the lobby, trying not to draw the attention of the desk clerk, a young woman with heavy makeup, blood-red nails, and a suspicious pouting mouth, who always wants to know how long Toni plans to stay. Fortunately, her attention is elsewhere. “What’s your problem?” the clerk barks into the phone. She doesn’t notice when Toni steps past and out the front door.

She meanders this way, that way, while all about her people full of energy and purpose hurry to their daily tasks. She wishes she could do a better job of pretending to have somewhere to go. What if she’s recognized? What if someone from the
ulpan
, or worse, David Konig, calls out from the throng? She imagines him tracking her. “Why are you avoiding me?” he would say, all innocent and hurt. “What’s the big deal?” Her reedy figure would be easy to spot. More than ever she feels conspicuously tall—an anomaly in a land of short, compact people.

She veers off the main road and drifts toward the district of the ultra-orthodox. Jews dressed as they did in the nineteenth-century ghettos of eastern Europe spill through the streets, wearing black frock coats, black hats, flowing beards, and earlocks,
payot
, spiralling down the sides of their preoccupied, stern-looking faces. The men rush past her averting their eyes, as required by their strict code of conduct. Women in sack-like dresses and tight kerchiefs herd flocks of young children. Weeks ago—it seems like months—Toni came here with David and Janet on a Friday evening. They stood together on a street corner while the sky turned a luminous royal blue and the joyful clamour of prayer issued from a dozen synagogues. Now she passes the same little courtyard where they had stopped to peek into windows and spy on housewives fussing over the Sabbath meal preparations.

“
Golem!
” a shrill voice calls.

She turns, startled. There’s no one in the courtyard but a very small boy seated on a doorstep. He has silky white-blond earlocks and a skullcap that covers his head like a black bowl. He sucks his fingers and stares at her with wide impudent eyes.