Housebroken (24 page)

He stretched his hands out to the space heater and rubbbed them together. I saw them glowing in the red light of the electric coils; he brought them so close that I bit my lip in sympathetic pain, but Nathan made the little smile that children make a second before doing something naughty, and then he put his hot hands on my cheeks.

My face absorbed the heat instantly. He left his hands there even after the heat had passed from him to me, and then took them away and put them close to the heater again, then put them on my hands and did the same thing again until the whole cycle took on the rhythm of a game. He put his hands against my neck, gathered heat from the heater as if cupping water in his hands, and quickly put them on my thighs. He asked if I could feel the warmth through my skirt and I said yes; my eyes were closed, he was the mediator between me and all the warmth in the world, and when he stopped I felt cold until he took off his blue sweatshirt and draped it over my shoulders.

We spent the night on the mattress. I wanted to tell him about myself but he didn't seem interested, and I too, after formulating a few sentences in my head, lost interest in what I had to say. I was worried about what would happen in the morning, when the magic of the tears and the rain and the game with the heat and the sex had vanished.

At five-thirty in the morning the alarm clock standing on the floor went off. Nathan kicked off the blanket, got up, put on his clothes—the ones he had worn the evening before—and began moving around the apartment. Without saying a word, he washed his face, brushed his teeth, filled the electric kettle with water. I sat on the mattress and picked up my clothes from the floor. He put on his work boots and asked how many spoons of sugar I took in my coffee; I said one, and he put the coffee on the floor, next to the the mug of tea from last night, which was still full. He drank his coffee in big gulps and walked around the room, fastened his watch around his wrist, tied his laces, opened the blinds, shoved his wallet into the back pocket of his jeans, turned off the heater, and stood next to the front door waiting for me to put on my coat.

“What time do you have to be at the nursery?” I asked as we ran down the stairs.

“Six-thirty,” he said.

“Do you want me to drive you?”

“No,” he said, “it's too far.”

“It's no problem,” I said. “It makes no difference to me once I'm in the car. And there's no traffic yet.”

“Thanks,” he said, “but I'm used to taking the bus.”

The car was standing outside, gleaming from the rain, a wet flyer stuck beneath one of the wipers. I pulled it out and threw it in the street. I opened the door and before getting in I said: “Last chance!”

He didn't say a word. As on the first night when I offered him a ride, he opened the door and squeezed into the seat next to me.

He stretched out his legs and yawned and rubbed his eyes and the car filled up again with that smell of his. Then he mumbled directions and stared out the window. We drove in silence for ten minutes until we left the city and turned off the main road into an industrial area, driving along a narrow road with small garages on either side, still closed. Then the orange groves began. “We're almost there,” he said, stifling a yawn, and pointed ahead, “right at the end of the road,” and I felt that time was running out, time in which I had to do something, I didn't know exactly what, but I knew I couldn't let whatever it was slip away. A couple of tears crept into my eyes. They surprised me, and I wondered if I might have harmed myself yesterday by bursting into tears like that, because maybe now I wouldn't be able to stop. I dried the tears, pretending I was just rubbing my eyes, and I yawned.

The sex had been good, but I knew that it wasn't just because of that; this wasn't the first stormy night to dissolve into a morning of fatigue and embarrassment and self-hatred. I was full of dread. The good sex and the weariness and the embarrassment were all familiar, but the dread was completely new.

I turned off the dirt road and Nathan said: “This isn't the turn.” I said: “I know,” and stopped the car behind a low concrete building covered with graffiti. I pulled on the hand brake and stroked his neck and opened his jeans' fly. We moved to the backseat and fucked. Then we got out of the car, each from his own side, and slammed the doors and looked, separately, at the view: Nathan stretched facing the orange groves and I stared at a brown field. We got back into the front seat, I started the car, and we continued our journey. When I let him off at the entrance to the nursery, whose huge tin sign was painted orange and decorated with plants and birds, he said: “So, good-bye,” and walked heavily to the gate. He took the keys out of his coat pocket and then turned around and came back to the car—I was still sitting there with the engine in neutral, yawning and rubbing my eyes to buy time—and leaned through the window, stammering: “You want to come over tonight?”

9

One day at the end of spring, in the week between the Holocaust memorial day and the Independence holiday, my mother had a heart attack. It was mild and it embarrassed her more than frightened her. What good was her freedom, she said, if her heart couldn't take it? The attack came late at night, in front of the TV. It was ten to one. Channel One had signed off and she wanted to go to bed. She stood up to turn off the television. The national anthem was playing in the background and she suddenly felt pressure on her chest and the famous stabbing in her left arm. She thought it was heartburn, or gas, because she'd eaten a lot of french fries that evening, but to be on the safe side, and in a panic which she found hard to admit even in her hospital bed, she called an ambulance.

My father was the first to be notified. He told me afterward in an accusing tone that they had tried to call me from the emergency room but I wasn't home. I was at Nathan's. When I got home early in the morning—after that first time, Nathan no longer allowed me to drive him to work; he said he could sleep in the bus, but I knew that he didn't want to owe me anything—there was a message from my father on the answering machine: “Maya, it's Daddy. Your mother had a heart attack,” and there was a note of triumph in his voice.

I drove to the hospital in frantic haste. I didn't know how serious it was. My father wasn't at home when I called back, and I assumed that he must be at the hospital, that he had been with her all night. I tried to prepare myself for the sight of my mother in intensive care, surrounded by monitors, pale, perhaps unconscious. Perhaps she had tried to call me when she felt bad, and I wasn't there. Perhaps she thought something had happened to me, perhaps she wondered whether to leave a message and what to say in it. I imagined her standing in the living room between the armchair and the television, between confusion and panic, pressing her hand to her chest, dialing the number for an ambulance while I was only a few streets away in a room on the roof of an old building, lying naked on a mattress covered with a velvet cloth smelling of dust and sweat, relatively happy. I sped through the empty streets and waited for stabbings in my own chest, for the first pangs of guilt, but they didn't come.

I parked in the empty hospital lot, went into the entrance lobby, and waited for the elevator. Next to me stood an orderly leaning on his elbow on a white metal trolley piled with bedpans and kidney-shaped bowls. The smell of disinfectant hit me and challenged the smell I still had on my skin. I stood next to the orderly in the elevator and sniffed my fingers and thought that sex could make a person calmer, wholer and stronger, that it beat anything: death, heart attacks, and all kinds of tragedies happening in every room, on every floor, at every minute—as if it were a big cross being waved by priests and nuns to scare off the devil.

The elevator stopped on the eighth floor and I went into the cardiology ward. I passed an old woman shuffling her feet in terry-cloth slippers and dragging a pole with intravenous bags swaying back and forth like transparent fruit. Next to her, a young woman held her elbow, trying to match her steps to the impossibly slow gait of the old woman. It was hard to tell if the young woman was a daughter, granddaughter, or hired help. And I thought: Mom has exactly the same slippers. And maybe later this morning I would take her for a walk in the corridors, and hold her elbow and crawl along by her side. I looked at the two women disappearing at the end of the corridor and thought of the night before.

Every morning when I came home—Nathan always insisted that we meet at his place—I would lie down in bed and go over every detail and the day would pass quickly. I checked papers and exams and gave everyone high marks, in the lazy haze and sudden generosity I felt toward the world. And when evening began to fall I tried to guess if Nathan was on his way home, if he'd changed buses at the central bus station, if he'd found a seat, if he'd reached his building, and if he was climbing the seventy-five steps to his apartment, standing in the kitchenette, drinking water from the bottle in the fridge, glancing at the note stuck to the door with a magnet, where I had written my phone number which he hadn't learned by heart, dialing and saying: “Hi, I'm home.” And I would ask: “So how was work?” And he would say: “The usual,” and I'd be sorry I'd asked, because we didn't ask each other questions, especially not the mundane kind couples asked each other—and he would say: “So do you want to come over?” and I'd hear him swallow a big gulp of water and say: “Yes.”

We had been seeing each other for two months every night except for weekends, which he wanted to keep for himself. I had no idea what he did on the weekends and I didn't ask. I didn't tell anyone about Nathan, except for Noga, who of course took a dim view of the whole thing. “You can't build a relationship on sex,” she said, when we sat in her and Amir's kitchen on Saturdays, and I said: “I know,” and she said: “You don't give a damn about what I say.”

In the mornings, when I came down the seventy-five stairs in Nathan's building—I always went up fast and came down slowly—I thought about Nathan getting dressed in his little room on the roof, rubbing his eyes and splashing cold water on his face, searching for his wallet because he always forgot where he'd put it during the night, standing at the deserted bus stop, dozing or reading the paper on the bus, looking out at the garages and the orange groves, the landscape that could have been part of my daily routine as well if we'd been a real couple. But there was an element of quiet bravura in me which said everything would be all right, that you couldn't go to bed with someone almost every night with such passion for such a long time without something happening in the end, good or bad. So I waited. I stood in front of the nurses' station and asked about my mother and the nurse said: “Mrs. Lieberman is in room number two,” and pointed the way.

Room number 2 was quiet and bathed in sunlight from the eastern window. My father was sitting next to her bed, on an orange plastic chair, reading a newspaper. My mother was lying on her side, facing the door. When she saw me, she sat up in bed and smiled and said: “You can go now, Jack. Maya's here. Thank you very much for coming. I appreciate it very much.” My father stood up, folded his paper, and looked at me, confused and embarrassed, as if he wanted me to intervene on his behalf and prevent his banishment from the room.

“Tell your mother to stop smoking,” he said as I got into the elevator after him and rode down to see him to the bus stop. “There's no need,” he said. “Go be with your mother. Don't leave her alone,” but I said that it was all right, that I'd keep him company for a while. In the entrance lobby he stopped at the kiosk and scanned the rows of candy. I wanted to remind him that they were forbidden, but I said nothing. He bought a chocolate nougat bar and slid it into his coat pocket. My father had a gray woolen coat that he had worn every winter for as long as I could remember. I don't know what he saw in this coat, which was bulky and ugly, and in any case it was already too warm for a coat. Perhaps he liked it because of the big pockets where he could hide things.

When the bus came I kissed him on the cheek, and promised to call and fill him in when I got home. He hadn't shaved and had prickly stubble on his cheek. I went back to my mother's room, which she was sharing with an old woman who was lying with her back to us with her face to the window, and all I could see was a mop of white hair sticking out of the blanket like mattress ticking. I thought: Maybe it's the old woman I saw in the corridor, exhausted from her walk. I asked my mother if they'd already told Tali.

“Why worry her?” She smiled at me. “It's nothing. The doctors say it's nothing. In two or three days I'll be back home.”

“Still,” I said, “I think we should let her know.”

“There's no need, Maya,” she said. “It's really not worth it. Do me a favor, don't call her. I don't want to worry her. The little one has an ear infection and Tali hasn't had a good night's sleep for a week. Leave it. In a day or two I'll be back home and we can call her then.”

She was sent home after a week. My father didn't visit her in the hospital again, but he called me twice a day. I don't know if he was really concerned, or just bored. The doctors gave her a list of strict instructions. She wrote it all down in her notebook, which she asked me to bring to the hospital. In the car on the way home she read the list aloud to me in a resentful voice. She had to stop smoking, lose weight, give up fried foods, and start doing moderate exercise, walking or swimming, for example. “I can't make so many changes at my age,” she said, cramming the notebook into her bag, opening the window, and lighting a cigarette.

I asked if she wanted me to stay for a few days. She said: “Absolutely not!” I said: “Mom, you need someone with you.” She said: “Don't start making a fuss, Maya. I'm not dying.” I said: “Still, I'll feel better if I know you're not alone at night,” and she said: “Okay, if it will make you feel better, then okay.”