Housebroken (34 page)

When the waiter gave him the check he pushed his hand into his coat pocket to find his wallet, and left the lighter lying on the table. It was a silver Zippo, without any inscriptions, but apparently it had sentimental value, because when I picked it up and looked at it, he snatched it from my hand and said: “I have a tendency to forget things.”

After not hearing from him for two weeks, I called him and asked how he was and whether he'd like to meet again. “No,” he said, without even trying to lie, “I'm sorry.”

And one night, at the end of winter, he called and woke me up and said: “I know I have a nerve calling after such a long time, but try to understand, I'm trying to get over a very complicated and painful relationship,” and I cut him short and said: “But I heard that it was over. A year ago or something like that,” as if it hadn't been two long months since we'd last spoken, and after a short silence he said: “Yes. But I'm not completely over it yet,” and I said: “I see,” and he said: “You don't, but forget it. You want to get together?” And I said: “Yes.”

“Are you free now?” And I said: “No. It's late,” so that he would know there were limits.

“Tomorrow,” I said, “but try to call at a reasonable hour,” and the next day he called at six and we made a date to meet at eight, and at ten he showed up, drunk.

8

“Did you ever do it?” he asked.

I blew out perfect smoke rings, which I'd practiced for hours sitting alone in cafés, or in the tool shed outside my house, where I'd forced myself, with lots of suffering and tears, to learn to smoke.

“Do what?” I asked.

He threw his cigarette into his mug and we both watched it send up smoke spirals. He put the mug on the windowsill and looked at the closed shutter and said: “Go home with men you didn't know.”

“No,” I said, “this is my first time. And you?”

“What?” he asked.

“Do you always bring home young girls you pick up in cafés?”

“Pick up?” he said. “Did I pick you up?” I nodded and he said: “Maybe. And no, this is the first time.”

“So you've never done it?” he asked and lit another cigarette. “With someone older, I mean?”

“No,” I said. “I've never done it with anyone younger either.”

“So maybe,” he said after a silence, which made the room even darker, “maybe I'd better take you home. Where do you live?”

9

“In a faraway country, full of jungles and lakes and white clouds speeding like racing boats in the sky and a sun dripping like a Popsicle onto the roofs of the houses, which were made of straw, and where happy and healthy families lived and raised intelligent monkeys that knew how to talk and tigers that could play the piano and elephants that liked to cry, lived a cruel wicked wizard who liked eating children.”

And I beg him: “Matti, enough with that story already. You know that it gives them nightmares.” But the children are riveted.

“You didn't say ‘tigers that could play the piano' yesterday,” says Shahar and his eyes light up.

“Yeah,” says Uri, “you added that now.”

“Are you sure?” Matti asks, but he doesn't hug them and tickle them as he used to when he tried to fool them, and the children nod together, enthusiastically, and I feel sad for them sitting there on the sofa, on either side of him, waiting for the hug and the tickling—which are the prize for anyone who spots a new detail in the story—but mainly I'm sad that they didn't notice that in yesterday's story he only said “happy families.”

“Are you positive?” he asks again, this time in a worried tone, as if he really doesn't remember, as if it really matters.

“Yes!” they shout and rub up against him, and Shahar's hands steal under Matti's T-shirt and tickle him, but their father, all mixed up and swollen from the medication, just stares into space.

“You didn't say it! You didn't say it!” Shahar shouts into his ear.

“It's time to go to bed now,” I say, and Uri gets off the sofa and goes to his room, looking back at Matti, but Shahar refuses to give in.

“But he didn't say it!” He begins to wail and rocks back and forth on Matti's knees. “Daddy, you didn't say it, right? Say you didn't say it!” But Matti doesn't say a thing and his hands lie still on Shahar's shoulders, and the boy hugs him and whispers in his ear: “You didn't say it. Say you didn't say it,” but Matti is silent and the child bursts into tears.

I pick him up and take him to the bathroom, and wash his face, and walk him to the toilet and stand next to him as he pees, and pull up his pajama pants and tuck in his undershirt, and slowly his whimpers turn into a sleepy mumble and as I put him to bed he yawns and turns over onto his stomach, and before I turn off the light he suddenly sits up and says: “I want Daddy to come and say good night.”

I go back to the living room and see Matti sitting in the same position, his hands suspended in the air, resting on the imaginary shoulders of a child, trying hard to remember if he mentioned the tigers yesterday or not, as if his life depended on it.

“You could have told him you didn't say it,” I say and start picking up toys from the floor. “It wouldn't have cost you anything.” And then it occurs to me that these arguments are ridiculous now, and with a pile of Lego bits in my hands I run into our bedroom and burst into tears.

10

What I really wanted was to go all the way, and I even had an exact picture in my head of what this going all the way should look like, with beauty and details that I can no longer remember, and for a year or two I rolled the words around in my head, and I walked down the street and said to myself: “Go all the way, all the way, all the way,” until I must have been so in love with the words that I no longer cared whom I would go all the way with, but I had no idea it would involve negotiations that I didn't know how to conduct, and I didn't know what to do with this man who was sitting on a chair in the middle of the room and holding his car keys in his hand and staring at the floor, and who had no idea what to do with me either.

11

Mrs. Rosen called this morning and said that Mr. Rosen was incontinent, and asked if this meant that he was dying. Every time this happens we find ourselves envying the simplicity with which the patients and their families put into words what for years we practice not to say.

“What happened?” we asked, ready to repulse a new outburst of tears which our short acquaintance with her taught us to expect.

“This morning I took him out for a walk, because it wasn't too hot so I thought it would be okay, and I took water for him and a hat and we sat on a bench in the park and talked, and suddenly I saw that his pants were wet. He peed in his pants! What am I going to do?”

We suggested that she move him into a hospice and there was a silence on the other end of the line.

“A hospice?” she said, sniffing.

“It's not what it sounds like,” we said, even though it is.

“A hospice?” she said. “So that means that he's dying, doesn't it? It means that he's dying!”

And again we found ourselves maneuvering between our obligation to medical jargon and the huge temptation to use simple human language in order to communicate with this woman whose husband had just peed in his pants.

“Your husband,” we said, “needs nursing care now. You could keep him at home, but in most cases it's more convenient, both for the patient and the family, to get appropriate care in a hospice. The hospice belongs to our hospital,” we said, “and Mr. Rosen will be able to receive proper care there. You have two small children, don't you?”

“Yes,” she said, “seven and five.”

“It would be better for the children if he went into the hospice. And for you, too, Mrs. Rosen. Matti now needs care twenty-four hours a day, and with two small children at home you can't take it all on yourself.”

12

“You're crazy,” he said and took off my sandals, “but obviously I'm even crazier than you are, I don't know what I'm doing and if anyone finds out they'll put me in prison for having sex with a minor. You know what the punishment is for having sex with a minor?”

The kisses started on the knees, soft kisses through thick denim, which surprised me a little because this wasn't what it said in the books and magazines I read in the toolshed or what the boys in my class did, with their blind hands groping all over the place. I lay on my back with my knees bent and looked at him crouching next to me kissing my knees, which amused me and excited me, and I thought: This is where my childhood ends. In a dark room, at the height of the afternoon heat, with a man who looks like an insurance agent and smells of sweat.

“Maybe,” he said, suddenly straightening up as if he'd seen a policeman peeping through the shutters, “maybe you should wait.” He began pacing back and forth in the room. “I don't know why I brought you here in the first place.”

“You didn't bring me here,” I said. “I came because I wanted to.”

“What did you want?” he hissed. “Do you know what you want? Do you realize I could be your father?”

“How old are you?” I asked.

“Thirty,” he said.

“Then you couldn't be my father. Maybe biologically, but not mentally.”

13

And this was the exact moment, if there are exact moments in these kinds of things, when he gave himself to me, the moment when I was angry with him for showing up drunk and stinking and pathetic, standing in the doorway, in a blue parka and muddy shoes, with a goofy smile on his face, as if he were testing me, to see if I would throw him out or if I was desperate enough to let him in.

14

And then he got off the chair, put the keys on the floor, lay down next to me on the mattress, and said: “What am I doing? What in the world am I doing?”

He took my hand and kissed it and opened my fist and spread my fingers out like a fan and looked at each of them separately, like a doctor or a piano teacher, and said: “Even your fingers are childish,” and I felt the edge of his weird collar tickle my cheek.

I took his hand and looked at his fingers, which were not those of a child but the long slender fingers of a man, covered with a fine black fuzz on the knuckles, and I noticed that his fingernails were in better shape than mine, which were always bitten and ugly, hiding eraser bits and sugar granules underneath them.

“Do you bite your nails?”

“Sometimes,” I said, “when I'm nervous.”

“And are you nervous now?”

“No,” I said, “not at all.”

“I would be nervous in your place.”

“But you are nervous.”

And for a long time we examined each other's hands, counting the fingers, bending and straightening them, sniffing them, pondering them and making remarks that grew more and more obscure, and kissing their tips, as if this activity both brought closer and postponed the moment when those fingers would be free to do what they wanted.

When I undid his shirt buttons, in the slow motion of films, he went on mumbling: “What am I doing? What am I doing?” but I knew that he didn't really mean it anymore. He wriggled out of his sleeves like a snake without letting go of me, maybe so I wouldn't change my mind and run away, but I had no such intention, had nowhere to go. Except home, to my parents.

15

I sat on the sofa and listened to him puking his guts out. It didn't disgust me so much as it frightened me, because I felt that at that moment, hunched over the toilet bowl and retching and coughing and maybe crying too, out of sorrow or shame or a drunken longing for her—I had to decide: to wait for him to feel better and then ask him politely to leave, or wait for him to feel better and make him stay.

Again and again the water flushed and I sat on the sofa, all dressed for our date, less formal this time than last, in a new dress with a low neck that I bought that morning without any hesitation, for a fortune, in a teenager boutique, and I tried to concentrate, to detach myself from the sounds and the smell that suddenly spread through the house, I tried to forget that he was there, puking in my bathroom—a stranger who had been given my phone number and called without wanting to.

He shut himself in the bathroom, washing his face and drying it with the clean towel I handed him through a crack in the door, and before I could decide what to do with him I went into the bedroom and took a clean sweatshirt out of the closet, in case he wanted to change. I put the kettle on and took a lemon out of the fridge and as I stood at the stove waiting for the water to boil he came and stood behind me, smelling of vomit and soap.

“I don't want anything to drink,” he said. “I think I'd better go. I've caused you enough trouble already,” and I turned to him and said: “Have a cup of tea with lemon and see how you feel afterward. And there's a clean sweatshirt on the bed in the bedroom. Maybe you should change, you got your sweater dirty.”

“I'm disgusting,” he said, with the smugness of self-pity, and looked at the stains on his sweater, and then he went into the bedroom and came out again wearing my sweatshirt, holding his sweater with the tips of his fingers.

“Where should I put it?”

“On the floor,” I said, “in the bathroom. I'll wash it for you in the morning, and in the meantime you can wear my sweatshirt home.”

He drank the tea without saying a word, without apologizing, without explaining, without thanking me, and at eleven o'clock I called a cab, even though he said he could drive. “Tomorrow,” I said, “when you pick up your sweater, you can take your car.”

But the next day I didn't hear from him, and when I went down to check, the car wasn't there.

16

The milk was spoiled. He got out of bed and went to the kitchen, groping in the darkness which had already stolen into the room from outside, and I heard him cursing: “Fuck, the milk's spoiled,” and I thought: This is the first time I've ever seen a naked man walking around next to me so naturally, and the naturalness frightened me more than the awkwardness that attracted me in the morning.