The People of Forever Are Not Afraid (34 page)

“I agree—it would have been so believable. I mean, she thinks her husband’s dead and his brother’s this fuckable guy from
Brokeback Mountain
,” the second film-school guy said. He had sunglasses in his long hair, holding it back like a girl’s hairband. “What do you think?” he asked Lea.

Lea was listening to the two guys with her chin in her hands, her elbows resting against the counter. A crowd pleaser. “I haven’t seen the movie,” she said.

“Oh,” the sunglasses guy said. “I’d say I’d take you, but I’d rather take you to a movie that’s actually worth something.”

“I will say, even though I haven’t seen the movie, when in doubt, have as many characters as possible fuck Natalie Portman,” Lea said. She was no prude.

“What a smart girl. I wish there were more girls like you in this city,” the sunglasses guy said. He reached over the counter and touched a strand of Lea’s hair. “When in doubt,” he said and laughed.

It was only because this kiosk was making him spend all this time with her, Ron thought. He should not lose his focus. He should not obsess. He got up from his plastic chair and walked to the counter. He stood by Lea. She smelled of skin,
of flesh. He counted to three. Then he reached over the counter and punched the sunglasses guy in the forehead.

The sunglasses hit the gray pavement but did not shatter. Ron wanted to unclench his fist but couldn’t. He looked at the two guys who stood quiet, fuming. He looked at Lea.

“Just go,” Lea said to the two film students. “For me?”

The tall one bent to lift the sunglasses off the street. It took him a while; he was drunk.

“For you,” he said, then tapped his friend on the shoulder and pulled him away. The sunglasses guy walked backward a few steps, staring right at Ron. Then he turned his back, dramatically, and kept on walking away.

“Lea …,” Ron said. She was staring right at him, her eyes catching the orange streetlights. He didn’t know why he had done what he had just done. He didn’t know what to say. He had never had her, and now he had lost her.

“Hey,” Lea said. “It’s Ok.”

Ron covered his eyes with his hands. She was a crowd pleaser. And that’s what he was: a crowd; worse than that, a boss.

But then.

“Would you like to go out with me once Vera comes in for her shift?” Lea asked. She put her palm on the back of his neck. “Hey,” she said. He had just hit someone, and here she was touching him for the first time, letting him stand so close.

It was strange. Even after she slowly took away her hand to grab a butter knife, he could still feel her fingers on his neck.

A
LOT
of people think that brilliance in business comes out of an ability to make cold, sensible observations, but Ron’s business sense came right out of his warm, open heart. Tel Aviv was full of tired, lonely people, people who had all moved to the city when they knew what they wanted but who had been quickly sickened by the race, by having to always get everything all on their own, by waking up in their tiny apartments, morning after morning, naked, sweaty, and afraid. To Ron all these people were the same, and they were not hard to understand. What they wanted was someone who would give them exactly what they would give themselves if they weren’t so tired, whatever it was. Someone who would never judge.

The principle was simple. Each customer could ask for whatever he wanted in his sandwich and have it prepared in whatever way, down to the last detail. No explanation or demand was too long or too difficult. A falafel sandwich with no falafel? Rye and turkey with three spoonfuls of sugar sprinkled on top? A pizza slice inside a pita with mayo? Orange juice that was heated in the microwave for twelve seconds? No problem! If the customer wanted an ingredient the kiosk didn’t have in stock, he could pay for ten sandwiches in advance and thus purchase a pink and lime green punch card and a guarantee that the ingredient would be available the next day and every day for the next four months. The shop was more than a gimmick—it was a solution.

L
EA WALKED
ahead of Ron down the streets of the city. Every time he caught up to her she started walking faster, until he somehow understood that walking this way was what she wanted, that this was the way she liked it. He accepted, he was in the business of accepting, and he trailed a few steps behind her. The streets were full of people, discarded toys, clothes, leaflets. Nothing in the city ever quite seemed to match. Even then, at 2:00 a.m., they saw a little girl walking all by herself, but she didn’t look poor—she wore a Gap sweatshirt—and she didn’t look lost. She was humming. On a bench, a skinny young boy and a middle-aged man with an accordion huddled over the sports page. Stores were out of line, bulging a little too much toward the sidewalk every so often. A shop selling hiking equipment next to a Judaica store—none of it made sense. With Lea walking in front of him, everything was strange but no less familiar.

At the LimaLima club, after a few drinks, when Lea disappeared and went to get herself one more, he still thought of the streets of the city, and his thoughts became weirder. Something was off, or maybe he was just not used to drinking so much. He remembered that a friend of his dad’s had once told him that the people who had built the city had been so idiotic they built it so the streets went parallel to the ocean, so that everywhere you go you get a view of someone’s porch rather than of the Mediterranean. The club was packed, the music so deafening, it blasted his chest cavity. In the darkness all he could see were tongues. He smelled parched breath and sweat and hair spray; limbs rubbed against his stomach, his ass; he pondered the possibility that perhaps the city was
someone’s half-assed idea, like the sandwich shop was his idea, that nothing was as it was meant to be, that maybe the city was never quite meant to exist on this earth, some bizarre cosmic glitch—

Lea threw her arms around his neck, careful not to spill her vodka Red Bull.

“That’s your fifth drink!” he screamed into her ear. He too was drunk, he reminded himself, although he had had only three drinks.

When she pushed her tongue into his mouth, he was still pushing away the pesky thought that something was not quite right; he pushed it and pushed it. Then he pushed Lea’s body closer to his and told himself he thought too much, that perhaps there were some disadvantages to being so pragmatic all the time.

On the dance floor, Lea’s fingers slid under his shirt. Her fingernails scratched him.

“I am not the good girl you think I am!” she shouted into his ear. “I have done some pretty bad things.” Her shout was the perfect volume—just loud enough so that he heard every word.

“Whatever it is, I don’t care,” he shouted back. He pulled her into a hug, the kind of hug you give a child. She was the best thing, a brilliant concept, the only good idea anyone had ever come up with, the only thing that fit just right, his brain decided.

H
E KNEW
it, actually, before his brain did. That she was right. For the first three months the We Don’t Judge sandwich kiosk
bled money like a slaughtered donkey. It did a little better than the Japanica had—their colossal mistake had been paying all this rent for a stand that only drew customers at night. No Israeli wants overpriced sushi for breakfast, and hardly any Israeli wants it for lunch, when the sun makes the fish stink. Overpriced sushi is a food you order in Israel when you are stumbling home or to another club after dark, when you can’t bring yourself to care, when you want to give the girl you picked up whatever she wants and get everything over with: this one stupid night, your whole stupid life.

Ron’s sandwich shop was open twenty-four hours, and he was there for fourteen of them for the first few months. He hired two of his teenage female cousins to take orders and an illegal worker from the Sudan to make them (and clean), but by August he knew he had to find new employees because his cousins had to start school. It was pathetic how many people in the city were desperate for a job, any job. His phone wouldn’t stop ringing. Models, PhD students, theatre actresses. For every dozen phone interviews he had, he scheduled one girl for a trial shift at the shop. He knew the gimmick was not enough, that in order for the business to succeed he had to have the right human resources. A girl who wouldn’t judge. A girl you’d want to buy a sandwich from. Lea.

In the interview, he asked each candidate to describe his or her dream sandwich. He asked them not to make something up just because it was original but to be honest, to tell the truth about themselves.

Lea said she would never dare to tell him the truth about her sandwich, about herself. That she was afraid he couldn’t take it. It was the most pretentious answer he got for that question but also the one he most believed.

He didn’t hire her because he wanted to fuck her. He hired her because she was good for business, simple as that. Falling for her the second he saw her was just a coincidence. Well, it was not a coincidence—what could a customer ask for other than being served exactly what he wanted by a girl no one could help but love?

S
HE CUT
in front of him after he turned the keys to the front door of his apartment. She walked through the door as he put the keys back in his pocket and bent over to take off his shoes. Her neck was stretched high, as if she didn’t even register that he was there. She looked around the living room, picked up the remote, then threw it back on the sofa. She stuck her head in the kitchen area, switched on the light, then switched it off again immediately. She walked through the short hall, opened the broom closet door, shut it, then opened the door to his bedroom. He could hear her body landing on the bed. “Well?” he heard her say while he was standing in the living room. And he felt foolish, so foolish, that he wasn’t already in there with her.

He realized he had never gotten around to fantasizing about sleeping with her. He had not expected her to sleep with him that night, but it felt as if it had all been planned, like the world had spun webs around his brain for years and eventually dropped him in those very moments, like the first time you see your favorite movie, and your mind already holds the memories of all the times you’ll see it next.