Housebroken (36 page)

I met his mother at our wedding. He hadn't told me much about her, only that she lived for many years now in France and that she was old. “My mother's old,” he said when I asked him about his family, “and my father died when I was a baby. As you see, I don't have much of a family background.”

And because my father died a few years earlier, and left my mother alone, but also thriving and independent, I thought that maybe we had something in common after all, but he read my thoughts and said: “At least you have a mother.”

“What do you mean?” I said. “So do you.”

“No,” he said. “What I have is a French passport.”

And yet she came for the wedding and sat alone all evening—even though my mother tried at first to cater to her—a woman of about seventy, obese, wearing a black widow's dress and a strange hat. She smiled at me whenever I went up to ask if everything was all right and apart from the apologetic smile, which Uri inherited, there was no other resemblance between her and Matti.

“A very unfriendly woman,” my mother whispered, “very unpleasant,” and I almost felt insulted for her, because she looked so out of it, sitting there on the chair with her black patent-leather bag, taking out a little mirror from time to time and looking at herself, or popping some cake into her mouth from the plate standing on the chair next to her. That's all she did all evening: stared into the mirror and ate cake that my mother kept bringing her.

“What's it like to grow up without a father?” I asked him one evening, a few weeks after he moved in with me. “Like you'd imagine,” he said. “What do you expect me to say?”

We were sitting in the living room waiting for guests to arrive. This was the first time I dared to invite people, because even though I wanted to show off my new status, to reassure my friends that things were working out for me too, and maybe get confirmation of the fact that we were together, because if we invited people over, if we played hosts, then we really were a couple. But I was afraid of the encounter, of his moods, or his aggressiveness, and of the fact that we looked like we weren't right for each other.

I apologized for being nosy and promised that I'd never ask him about his father again. “Or my mother,” he said, and I said, “or your mother, if you don't want to talk about her.” But when I danced with him at our wedding, I couldn't take my eyes off the woman sitting in the corner, eating cake and looking so lost.

When he called to tell her that we were getting married, he said to me: “You'll see, she won't come but she'll send a check. You can bet on it, and I want you to know, Mira, that I don't want her money. If she sends a check, I'll send it back. I don't need any favors from her.” But she didn't send a check. She came. Maybe because she was already too old to send checks, something that Matti overlooked in his anger.

They came that evening and brought gifts, as if the fact that I was living with someone was an occasion for a housewarming: Eli and Hagit, and Dan and Liora, my friends, ready to accept Matti as a member of the family, to pat him on the back, and guide him through the intricacies of bourgeois life.

“So he's the child rapist?” Dan said to me in the kitchen, when he came to get soda for the Scotch they'd brought us from their trip abroad. “He looks pretty normal.” And Liora, who drifted into the kitchen, because Dan had forgotten the ice, said: “He's sexy.”

“Really?” I said. “You think so?”

“Wow!” she said. “I can see why that little girl fell in love with him.”

And I couldn't explain to them that Alona was not yet part of the past, because it would have undermined the pretext for the housewarming, and I couldn't tell them that Alona wasn't going to turn into a banal subject of conversation in the kitchen so quickly, between filling bowls of peanuts and taking ice cubes out of the tray. I saw her in his eyes when he watched me coming in and out with trays of refreshments like a perfect hostess, and I didn't know if he was proud of me or ashamed, and I could feel her breath in his silence which continued all evening and I wondered: How come nobody else hears her little wings flapping against the furniture? How come they don't see her sitting with her legs crossed on top of the bookcase, laughing at all of us?

22

And for no special reason—maybe because I was so tired, maybe a delayed reaction to the burn, or maybe because of the stubble which suddenly made him look dangerous—I burst into tears.

He was frightened. Maybe he hadn't seen too many women sobbing in his bathroom without any explanation or advance warning, while he was standing in front of the mirror, half admiring and half disgusted by himself. He turned around and bent down and held my hands and shook me and asked: “What's wrong? What's wrong?”

I said: “I don't know.”

“But what's wrong? What's wrong with you, Alona?”

“Nothing,” I said.

“Let's go to the room, okay? It's too hot in here. Let's go back to the room and you'll tell me what happened.”

“I want to be alone for a while. I'll come in a few minutes, okay?”

“But I want us to talk. We have to talk!”

“Yes,” I said, “but in a little while.”

“I knew this would happen,” he said and looked at the mirror again, as if something had changed there in the meantime.

“What?”

“Forget it now. Maybe we shouldn't have.”

“Shouldn't have what?”

“Gone to bed.”

“But that's not why I'm crying.”

“So why are you?”

“I don't know. I swear. I don't know.”

“You must be traumatized. Did you ever see a dick before?”

“Sure I did. Don't flatter yourself.”

“I'm concerned about you.”

“Do me a favor, don't worry about me. Okay? I swear I've seen dicks before.”

“Where?”

“It's none of your business.”

“In pictures?”

“No. In person.”

“But where? I want to know.”

“Why? What's it got to do with you?”

“I'm just curious.”

“Boys, at school. Boys I fooled around with.”

“How old?”

“What a stupid question!”

“Why, is it a secret? Do you have secrets from me?”

“Fifteen, sixteen, maybe. Seventeen.”

“Seventeen! And you want to tell me that they didn't try to fuck you?”

“There was only one who was seventeen.”

“And?”

“He didn't try.”

“I don't believe it.”

“You think everybody only wants to fuck all the time? Like you?”

“So that's what this is all about, Alona? You think that all I want to do is fuck you?”

“No.”

“So why did you say that?”

“I don't know,” I said and burst into tears again. “You said you'd leave me alone for a few minutes and you're just standing here and arguing with me.”

“But I want to know if that's what you think: that all I want is to fuck you.”

“No.”

“Then tell me why you didn't sleep with that guy. That seventeen-year-old.”

“'Cause I didn't want to.”

“Why not?”

“I wasn't attracted to him.”

“And you're attracted to me?”

“I don't know.”

“So why did you go to bed with me?”

“Because I wanted to.”

“But how could you want to if you weren't attracted to me?”

“I was.”

“So before you were attracted and now you're not?”

“I don't know.”

“You gotta know.”

“But I don't.”

“But you knew that you wanted to go to bed with me.”

“Yes.”

“Did you want to go to bed with me, or did you just want to go to bed with anyone?”

“With you.”

“You can tell me the truth.”

“But I am telling you the truth.”

“Maybe you just wanted someone to rescue you from your virginity.”

“No. And that's disgusting. Don't say it.”

“What: ‘To rescue you from your virginity'?”

“Stop it!”

“So do you want me to leave you alone so you can decide whether you want me or not?”

“No.”

“So what do you want? You want me to take you home and we'll end it there? So you can run to your best friends tomorrow and tell them that you finally got fucked?”

“I don't have best friends.”

“That's impossible. All girls have best friends.”

“I'm not a girl.”

“Oh, sorry. All young women have best friends.”

“But I don't.”

“You want to go home? I'll take you.”

“I don't want to go home.”

“So what do you want? Do you have any idea what you want?”

“No.”

“Then let me tell you something: Maybe I'm a pervert and I really should go to jail but it's been years since I was so attracted to someone and it's been years since I had such a hard-on, like that seventeen-year-old of yours, and then you come on to me at the café…”

“I didn't come on to you.”

“Yes you did. Your eyes were begging: Take me, take me, fuck me…”

“Stop it! That's not true!”

“So I take you home with me, and believe me I'm shitting in my pants the whole way, and we go to bed, and it's amazing, better than I thought it would be, because I had doubts, and you should know that it's my first time with a virgin, not that it excited me or anything, and I saw that it wasn't such a big deal either, all those stories about blood et cetera, unless I'm not the first, Alona, but forget it…”

“You are!”

“Never mind. As far as I'm concerned, it makes no difference to me if you've been fucking since you were ten. I'm just not sure what happens next, Alona, but I want something to happen, I don't know what, but I don't want it end as a one-night stand, and I want to teach you things, and I want to be with you, but I also don't want to get hurt, and all this time I'm thinking: Maybe she likes me, too? Maybe she's enjoying it, too? And I saw your face in bed and I thought that you enjoyed it.…”

“I did! I really did!”

“And you don't have to pretend, either. Do me a favor and don't start faking orgasms for me; you're too young for that. If you're not enjoying it, then tell me.”

“But I was! I swear I was!”

“How do you know if it was your first time? You were so quiet. You didn't make a sound. I looked at your face and I thought: Yes, she's enjoying it. It's good for her. And now I think that maybe you were in pain. Did it hurt?”

“No.”

“And now?”

“A little.”

“And is that why you're crying?”

“No.”

“You promise? Because that's the last thing I want, to hurt you. I think I was a little too violent.”

“You weren't. It was good.”

“Now you say that you don't know if you're attracted to me.… I'm sorry,” he said. “I went too far. I don't know what I want from you. I have no right.…”

It saddened me when he wiped my tears with the back of his hand and then my nose and even kissed the snot. “I apologize,” he said. “I won't put any pressure on you. Do whatever you feel like. I just keep forgetting how old you are.”

“But it's not important how old I am,” I said.

“It is, but I should have thought of that before.”

“It isn't,” I said. “It's not important.”

He stood up, washed his face, and turned back to me, drying himself with a towel and mumbling into it: “You're still a child.”

So I went down on my knees and pressed my cheek to his thigh and with one hand he held the towel and with the other he stroked my hair and I closed my eyes and he dropped the towel and lifted my chin with his hand and looked at me and smiled and said: “Your hair's still wet. I don't want you catching a cold.” And I wiped my eyes on his thigh and felt it tensing and his hand dug into my hair. “Don't you dare catch a cold on me now,” and he closed his eyes and held my face in both his hands and pressed it to his thigh, and I knew what I had to do.

23

Lake Kinneret was as crowded as usual during the Passover vacation, but this time it was also raining, and Matti, who was horrified by the idea of sleeping in a sleeping bag, got into the car and announced that we were going home. But he forgot the way. The children fell asleep covered with the towels we threw over them because we hadn't thought of bringing coats, and Matti, driving fast, in the dark, confused, cursing, couldn't remember how to get home.

“What's the matter with you?” I yelled.

“Nothing! What do you want from me?”

“I don't understand what happened to you!” I said, because this was the first time in my life that he had managed to really scare me. “What is it, Matti, don't you feel well?”

“I'm fine,” he said, but when we hit a dirt road and the car sank into the mud and the children woke up, at first excited by the adventure but then petrified, I said: “That's enough! Let me drive!”

“Why?” he said. “You think you know the way better than me?” And the wheels skidded as he tried and tried to get us out of the mud but only sank deeper.

“At least I can see. I can read signs. You can't see well. Yesterday you complained that you couldn't see.”

“I can see very well, thank you.”

“But why? Why are you being so stubborn, Matti? Do you want to kill us all?”

And there was nobody to turn to for help. It was dark and cold and deserted and the rain beat down hard on the roof and the children began crying and it was clear to me that we weren't going to get out of there.

And suddenly he seized his head in his hands and began to shake and said: “I'm dizzy, I don't feel well,” and when I said: “See what I mean?” he passed out.