Housebroken (33 page)

And suddenly I feel like crushing the eggs I took from the fridge in my hands, and throwing them at the wall, or throwing them from the balcony on the heads of anyone passing by, like the children used to do with their toys, just to let someone down there know there's a woman up here on the verge of a breakdown.

My mother runs into the kitchen horrified and says: “He said ‘dying'! What should we do?” And I say: “Nothing, ignore it. He doesn't know what it means anyway,” even though he knows very well, because in addition to everything else he inherited his father's brains and pessimism, and he looks exactly like him too, his hair and his eyes, and the bitter smile that doesn't look good on a child his age, and our friends always say: “You can see that Uri is Matti's boy and Shahar is Mira's,” and it terrifies me to think that soon both of them will be mine.

4

“Alona,” I said, “my name is Alona,” and he called the waiter and paid for both of us, and I didn't object because I thought that this was the way these things were supposed to happen, that he was the man and I was his adventure, so he should pay, and we got up, and I followed him to his car, and sat next to him and looked straight ahead, and we didn't talk the whole way, but whenever we stopped at a light he looked at me and asked: “How old are you?” And at the first light I said: “Seventeen,” and at the second light he asked: “So how old are you?” and I said: “Sixteen,” and at the last light, so that he should know that he was my adventure too, I said: “Fifteen, and I swear that's the truth.”

5

He lies to the doctors like a child. As if that's what will save his life. But he was never good at it, he always told the truth, even when I didn't ask him to, even when I asked him not to, to spare myself pain.

At first, days would go by without us exchanging a word, till Uri was born and provided us with a topic that may not have been fascinating, but which we at least had in common. And in spite of the anxieties and fears he always had about various disasters that could strike the child every minute of the day, even when he was sleeping, he was a model father.

He was the one who got up at night and stood by the crib long after Uri had fallen asleep. I would find him there at all kinds of strange hours of the night, leaning against the wall, or sitting on a little plastic stool, looking at the baby in the darkness and counting his breaths. When he diapered him I wasn't allowed to come near, as if I was disturbing some mysterious ritual. But the really bizarre thing was to see Matti feeding him: pushing the spoon into his mouth and immediately pressing his lips to the baby's face to lick up anything that dribbled out, even if it was Gerber's baby food or a soft-boiled egg, until one day I couldn't stand it anymore and I said: “Why don't you use a towel?” He looked at me and said: “My method's better.” It was an intimacy that embarrassed me. Everything that didn't exist between us existed between them, between Matti and this baby who looked exactly like him.

One night, when Uri was two—a child with a full head of black hair and the smile of someone who wasn't sure if it was okay to smile, I was at the end of my pregnancy with Shahar—Matti was playing with him in the living room, throwing him up in the air and catching him, and singing a song, and suddenly he missed and Uri fell on the floor and cut his head open. He screamed and he was bleeding, but Matti pushed me aside with his elbow and picked him up, grabbed the keys from the kitchen table, and ran barefoot with him to the car, and before I had time to catch up with him he had already started the car and driven off, as if I didn't exist, as if it wasn't my child he had almost killed, and I didn't know what hospital he took him to, but I took a cab and searched emergency rooms before I found him in the third one, sitting on a bench by the pay phones with Uri in his arms, a big bandage on his head and one eyelid swollen, orange iodine stains all over his face, and Matti was hugging him and rocking him, and when he saw me he put his finger to his lips and whispered: “Five stitches. They gave him five stitches! Can you imagine?” And the truth is that I didn't know then if five stitches was a lot or a little and I didn't say a thing, and on the way home I drove because he said his legs were trembling.

6

And afterward, the instant coffee he gave me in a mug he quickly rinsed, and for himself Turkish coffee with milk, and the memory of the two mugs standing on the counter when I went into his room with him following me, scratching his head all the time as if something was bothering him, and neither of us came out again until dark.

There was an old stereo system on the floor, a plastic box from the supermarket holding records, a bookcase made of red bricks and wooden planks, a small TV with a twisted coat hanger for an antenna, an ashtray full of stubs, a mattress covered with an Indian cloth, and a glass lying on its side next to a dry stain of coffee residues. He wasn't expecting guests.

Next to the wall was a closet with a yellow T-shirt and a towel hanging from the door. It was one of those rooms where life takes place on the floor, and which give you the feeling that you're too tall, and so I sat down on the mattress, put my bag down beside me, and looked at him. He remained standing next to the door for a moment, and then he went into the kitchen and brought a chair whose seat and backrest were made of sky blue Formica, stood it in the middle of the room, sat down, and lit a cigarette as if he was about to interview me for a job, or remain silent for the rest of the afternoon. I rummaged in my bag and pulled out my cigarettes.

“You smoke a lot?” he asked, picking up the glass from the floor and dropping his ash into it.

“Yes,” I exaggerated, “a pack and a half a day.”

“You started early,” he said in a reproachful voice and stroked the rim of the glass.

“When did you?”

“Me?” he said. “A long time ago. But I'm a lost cause.”

He said “lost” as if it were true and as if he enjoyed saying it, and I felt pleasant tingles of danger running up my back, even though it was obvious that this man wasn't dangerous, and then I noticed that his shirt collar was too big and looked like the wings of a plane, and that under his armpits there were perspiration stains, which may have started before, in the café, or this morning, when he left the house, before he got into trouble, before we got into the car which was parked in a no-parking zone, and which had a ticket stuck on the windshield that he didn't even look at before he shoved it into the glove compartment which was already full of tickets, and then his skillful parking outside the house, the parking of a bank robber, with the nervous clicks of the steering wheel, and the way he ran up the stairs, leaving me a few steps behind, and opened the door with two turns of the key that shook the silence of the staircase, and waited for me, and closed the door behind me, and locked it twice, and immediately asked if I wanted coffee, and I immediately said yes, and only when I looked at his back as he stood at the sink and washed the mugs and I smelled his sweat did I begin to be afraid. But it wasn't exactly fear.

“Nice place,” I said, because it seemed a grown-up thing to say, and went into the room. “It's a little small,” he said and I felt his breath on my neck as he stood behind me and examined the room with me, as if he too was seeing it for the first time. The shutters were closed, and the room smelled of shade and dust and there was a silence about to be disturbed, and the premonition of a crime that was about to be committed.

I wasn't afraid of the man sitting on the chair and smoking, or of the room that was as crammed as an old suitcase. But maybe I don't really remember the room. I'm pretty sure about the darkness, and the T-shirt and towel hanging from the closet door, because the towel became mine and I wore the shirt sometimes at night, but maybe the TV with the coat hanger, and the bookcase, and the spilled coffee are borrowed from other, later rooms, which it saddens me to remember, as if the memory itself is a betrayal of Matti, which is a betrayal of a chance to find out something about myself, something innocent and far and forgotten, and maybe a little boring.

But I remember the two mugs standing and getting cold on the counter, brown mugs with a pattern of yellow and orange splashes, and the chair he sat on, and how he smoked and talked quietly and suddenly got up in the middle of a sentence and went to wash his face, and came back, and dried his face and hands with the thoroughness of a surgeon, and threw the towel back onto the closet door and said: “It's hot as hell today.”

7

At the end of June they called me into their office and said that the tumor had grown to the size of a tennis ball, or a Ping-Pong ball, I don't remember which, but it was definitely a ball. Matti stayed home, and when I got back from the hospital he didn't even bother to ask. Only at night, before we went to sleep and he lay with his back to me, his fingers drawing circles on the wall, did he mumble: “Did they say anything?”

“Yes,” I said, and I was glad that I couldn't see his face, “they want to stop the radiation. They don't think there's any point continuing.”

“That's what they said?” he asked.

“They didn't actually say it. They hinted.”

And then, for a while, I only heard his breathing and the hum of the electric fan, and I couldn't even bring myself to stroke his back. And suddenly Shahar came in crying and said there was a monster in his room, the same monster we had been trying to get rid of for a long time, and I got out of bed and went with him to chase the monster away and I thought: If there's a monster in the house it's me, because, how come I was so relieved when Shahar stormed into our room, into our silence, into our disaster, and I was so happy that I could take him in my arms and hug him and comfort him.

We've been together for eight years and there haven't been too many ups and downs in our relationship, and I don't know if it's because we're so different, or because from the beginning we didn't have too many expectations. And now that he's going to die, I don't feel anything for him. Not even the need to take care of him that I felt when I met him. And maybe this lack of feeling is normal, too; maybe it's something I should ask the doctors about. Because maybe they know. And if they don't, maybe they'll invent something. A theory. Like one of those theories they offer you like a shot in the arm, to give you hope for at least five minutes, so God forbid you won't pass out in their office.

I courted him as one courts a wounded man: gently, without pressure, but with persistence and the unspoken promise that I was the answer to his pain. He always said: “Mira, there are a lot of sides to me that you don't know about,” and I always said: “Whatever's not related to our life together I don't have to know.” And now I regret it.

But I don't regret the fact that he gave up his childish ideas of being a film director, or that thanks to me he found a steady job in computers, because how long can you go on dreaming at our age, and I'm not sorry either that I married a man who was in love with somebody else. I knew that things would work out, and they did, after Uri was born and Matti cried at the hospital and said that it was the excitement of being a father, but I knew it was really grief for that young girl, and that Uri's birth had shaken him out of the illusion that our marriage was just a first-aid station.

He loved her. And so insanely that at first I wasn't even jealous, because I couldn't imagine him loving like that, or myself loving like that, and I couldn't imagine anyone loving like that. And it was only later on, when I realized that because of this insane love he couldn't give me even the little, normal love I wanted so much, that I began to be jealous.

This is a small town, and the people here are generous with the information they offer. During our first year when he left me every other day and in the end begged me to marry him, because he'd gotten used to the comfort of a home and cooked meals and a sympathetic ear, I would meet people in the street who knew him and who told me what she was like, and what he was like with her, and how they broke up.

It was a blind date. A mutual friend gave him my number and told him that he just had to get over it. We arranged to meet in the Café Milano, even though I hate that place because it's always deserted and the only people who go there are old men and perverts, but I didn't want to sound too choosy.

He was waiting for me inside, at a corner table, and he looked haunted and unhappy about the whole thing. “There's a courtyard outside,” he said, “if you're not cold we can sit there,” but I said that it was all right inside and I sat down opposite him. He was wearing a big gray sweater with moth holes in the sleeves, and I immediately fell in love with his hands, which were delicate but not too small and were busy all the time with his lighter and cigarettes. He called the waiter, and when he arrived, a very unfriendly type, he asked me what I wanted and I said tea.

“Earl Grey, herb tea?” Matti asked.

“Regular tea,” I said.

“With lemon?”

“No, nothing. Just tea.”

“Milk?”

“No,” I said, “just plain tea.”

“Would you like a piece of cake? A sandwich?” he asked in a hostile tone, clicking his lighter on and off, and I said: “No, just tea.”

I had been warned not to expect too much. I was told that after she left him, his cynicism, which had once had a certain charm to it, became sharp and nasty. Maybe that's why I felt that everything I told him about myself on that first date would be erased before he even noticed that he was listening to the mundane talk of someone who wasn't much to look at either. Though he didn't look at me all evening, I knew that he was taking in my appearance and that he was disappointed: the tailored jacket and narrow skirt and brown high-heeled pumps and the blouse with the Chinese collar and the pearl necklace, which was a present from my mother for my thirtieth birthday, and even my perfume, which was so floral and subtle.