New York 1, Tel Aviv 0

by Shelly Oria

  WAIT

  Wait with the babies, would you? By which I mean, make sure she’s on the pill. We have been divorced for a while now, but we were married for many years; that means I have no right to ask you to wait, but you have no right to refuse me.

  * * *

  You don’t know who I’m talking about, but she will be blond. A year from now, you’ll be having an argument in a restaurant uptown. It will be about green olives—you keep forgetting she’s allergic—but it will be about fear. Her fear of losing you, her fear of me.

  * * *

  It’s possible that her blond hair is making her prone to excessive insecurity. You might want to look into that.

  * * *

  Except, honey, she’ll be right. It’s a scary thing, dating someone with a past like ours. You still had decades of marriage left in you when I asked you to cook only when you’re hungry.

  * * *

  I never meant to leave you, you know. I just woke up one morning having left you, and so I left you again, because what’s the sense in arguing with reality?

  * * *

  So, honey, run after her, would you? I know how you feel about running, I know all about your bad knee. Just listen. Forget about the check, silly. You can always go back the next day. And look around you—would they go out of business over two unpaid filets? So run. You never knew when to grab and when to let go, I’ve always had to tell you. And so I’m telling you now.

  * * *

  When you catch up to her—she’ll run like a woman who wants your hand to grab her shoulder from behind, which is to say slowly—lie. Express feelings you don’t yet feel, make promises you’re not sure you can keep. You are a truthful man, I know. But darling, in love, a lie makes a clearing for truth to come in.

  * * *

  I know you must find this confusing. I am confusing you. That was the problem, wasn’t it? I always confused you and you kept trying to follow me. I led us down some spiral roads, and when we reached the bottom we saw reflections of us looking frustrated and old. I would say, Please take responsibility for these people we don’t know; it hurts my eyes to look at them. And you’d say, I take full responsibility and I apologize and can I get you some eyedrops? You always wanted to get me eyedrops.

  * * *

  It may not appear this way, but what I’m doing is trying to climb back up that spiral road. Some days my muscles hurt but I keep going because I’m reading books that tell me to lean in to the pain. I lean in to my pain until I twitch, until I shake. Unfortunately, twitching and shaking are not things one can lean in to—I’ve tried. The outcome involves falling.

  * * *

  Your silence is asking me what I truly want—which is to say I am asking myself. That was my earlier point about reflections, but that’s not important now.

  * * *

  I want you to run after her. When you grab her shoulder from behind, I want you to pretend to be out of breath. It’s not hard, for God’s sake—just fake short, quick breaths and pull her close to your chest. I want you to promise her you’ll never forget about her olive allergy again. I want you to tell her your forgetfulness is not a sign of anything, and certainly has nothing to do with me. I want you to make up some bullshit story that explains your behavior. You know how your parents never remember what foods you dislike? You can work with that. She’ll believe anything, because she’ll want to. And I want you to make her believe. Hold her tight for a few minutes. It’ll be cold and windy, but darling, you really need to man up about winter. When she stops crying, I want you to kiss her. I want you to look into her eyes and say something horribly cliché like The past is in the past. My sense is she will not be the type sensitive to clichés. But say it like you mean it, honey, because what I’m telling you is that eventually you will. And throw my name in there when you say it. She needs to see that you can say my name without pain in your chest. Don’t let her see the pain in your chest.

  * * *

  But darling, wait. We held each other’s hands in hospital rooms, we laughed for three days once, we spoke complete sentences in unison. We loved through our twenties, and we turned thirty together, four years apart. And one warm September we invited two hundred and seventy people and promised all of them that we would love each other forever, and in return these people gave us money, and gifts.

  * * *

  So when she cooks that special meal and buys that sexy nightgown—I’ve mentioned she’s not bothered by clichés—and tells you she wants to have your baby, wait. Would you wait? Remember the song you recorded for me. Remember that drive up north on my birthday. Remember our first date, your grandmother’s old Beetle. So many hours we spent in cars, singing. Just wait.

  * * *

  Tell her now isn’t a good time. Tell her you don’t have enough money saved up yet. And tell her you’ll probably get there eventually—set a date to discuss babies again. Say, Let me get through this next round of fund-raising and then I’ll know more. Compliment her on the steak—because isn’t it nice to be with a meat eater, and isn’t it nice to be with someone who cooks—but stop eating when she shows you the nightgown. Pretend to have lost all interest in the food. I know you never lose interest in food, honey, but what I’m saying is sometimes it’s okay to pretend. So pretend. You’ll have a great night, you’ll see.

  * * *

  But call me the next day. Would you call me? Tell me she wants to start trying and I’ll say, Trying what. I can be thick when I want to avoid pain. Be gentle with me. Explain. I’ll ask what you want, how you feel. I’ll pretend that this is a conversation we can have. But at the end, right before we hang up, I’ll hold my breath and whisper, Wait. Would you hear me? Would you wait?

  DOCUMENTATION

  Kisses #1–3

  I kiss you for the first time, and it starts to rain. You tell me it’s a sign of something, maybe good luck. We don’t have an umbrella, so we just stand there kissing, getting wet, and I think about what you said. The idea that the sky is talking to us makes me uncomfortable, but I don’t say that, and hug you instead. You mistake my hug for agreement, and let your face sink into my shoulder. The air smells clean.

  * * *

  The second time I kiss you is an attempt to comfort; you’ve just found out your cat died. I don’t like cats, but that would clearly be the wrong thing to say, so I think maybe a kiss could fill in for words. Your sadness makes your lips soft, too soft, and I feel like I’m shaping a kiss out of Play-Doh. You know the difference between passion and empathy, of course; you stop me, your left hand between our mouths. I walk away from you; this is noon and New York and the street is roaring. You are alone now with your distance, with your sorrow, with the memory of your dead cat.

  * * *

  I kiss you a third time, two weeks later, and it’s a good kiss—just the right balance of wetness and dryness, closeness and a sense of self. You are the reason this kiss is a success, this is your accomplishment. I am impressed, and decide to document every lip encounter between us from now until there is nothing more to document. This will be three years later, in an ice-cream parlor on Sixth Avenue, where you will kiss me with chocolate-chip cookie dough and finality, and I will let my ice cream drip all over my new tank top after you’ve gone, like in a bad movie.

  * * *

  For now, documenting helps me forget what I don’t yet know.

  Kiss #17

  I kiss you in a swimming pool. The lightness of my body in the water makes me feel inconsequential. I try to leave my frustration out of our kiss, but that’s the thing about kisses, isn’t it? You can never leave anything out.

  * * *

  The smell of chlorine stays in my skin for two days. I take multiple showers, because I don’t know how to passively wait for things to get better. You say that I’m crazy, that I’m imagining things, imagining the chlorine. I pretend the smell is gone before it really is.

  Kiss #99

  This is a Sunday-morning kiss in upstate New York. We are at a bed-and-b
reakfast. It has been a long time since you kissed me like this, and it reminds me of that kiss that made me fall in love with you (see kiss #3). Yesterday was filled with disappointment; we got lost and couldn’t find I-87, then the hot tub wasn’t as big as you’d expected. But this kiss, the first thing that happens to me on Sunday, is light with possibility and future.

  Kiss #146

  This is the kiss that tells me the rules have changed. I clearly taste salami, which I know you don’t eat, and your tongue is doing something it’s never done before: some kind of loop to the left, then to the right; it feels calculated and foreign, and my mouth goes numb.

  Kiss #147

  I kiss you again, two hours later—an attempt to replace the memory. You would never let me kiss you if you knew my motivation, because you think I’m always treating life as if it’s a film and pretending to be the director. I want this kiss (#147) to prove the former (#146) wrong. It does not. I decide to ignore it, ignore the salami.

  Kiss #163

  The promise kiss. There’s something I need to tell you, you say, and Salami has a name now, though I refuse to repeat it. You promise me that it’s all behind us. You say it was just a slip, and I keep thinking, Slip, slip, slip of the lip.

  Kiss #212

  This kiss tells me you’re bored again. We are at MoMA (this is before they closed, before they renovated, before they reopened; by then we will not be together). We look at a beautiful black woman Chris Ofili made from elephant dung. The couple next to us finds it romantic. They laugh, and mid-laughter the man grabs the woman by her shoulders. It’s a powerful gesture; his hands are telling her he is sure.

  We look at them, and it seems that we’re supposed to follow. But in our kiss there is nothing but habit. I realize then that we are not really done with Salami—that when you let things like that in, they can never find the way out.

  Kiss #288

  Kiss #288 gives me false hope, which, without the perspective of time, appears simply as hope.

  We are visiting your parents in California, and it is going well. I’ve already met your dad when he was in New York on business, but everyone knows it is the mother who decides how the parents feel. She will announce her verdict with her arms, I know, when she hugs you goodbye before we leave. But this will only happen in two days, and now, on the evening of our arrival, everyone is tired except us, though we are the ones who should be sleepy, with our internal clocks still on East Coast time. You sneak into the bathroom when I go there to pee, and we kiss with the excitement of teenage rebels.

  Kisses #289–301

  These kisses are an attempt to relive that bathroom kiss, kiss #288. We look for dark places, inappropriate places, places lived in by people we don’t even know. When there are no more excuses for hiding, we hide in private and pretend it’s the same. When we can no longer pretend, we lie. Hiding was something we found exciting for a while, we say, and now we’re over it. When the lie is exposed, we look the other way. I know what you are thinking: we’re like the worst poker players on earth, refusing to look at the cards we are holding.

  * * *

  When winter comes, I know the end is close. When I tremble at night because the window is cracked, you hold me, and you let your hands run up and down my back, my arms; but there are no more kisses. All winter long I wait for you to show up with empty boxes, a duffel bag, something that can host your belongings as they depart from shelves and drawers. I say nothing about it, and clean the apartment twice every day because I don’t know how to passively wait for things to get worse. When I cry one evening for no reason, you kiss my tears, and I wonder whether or not it counts, whether or not it should be documented. By the end of winter I know, the way events sometimes unfold in a woman’s mind before their time, that our first ice cream this summer will be our last.

  THE DISNEYLAND OF ALBANY

  Avner had woken up too late. Only when he walked over to get the coffee going, his electric toothbrush humming along—how Netta used to hate that—and caught a glimpse of the clock on the kitchen counter did he realize he’d miscalculated. How had that happened? He’d set two different alarms to two-fifteen a.m., was half awake the whole night, but by two-fifteen, he now realized, he should have already been on his way. He felt terror at the thought of his little girl waiting for him alone at JFK in the middle of the night. She wouldn’t be alone, would she? There would be a flight attendant taking care of her, there always was, but he’d never been late, and so who knew how that worked. He started moving fast, throwing last things into his suitcase, bumping into everything in his speed. What a bad idea it all was, this trip to Albany.

  * * *

  From a distance it looked like they were laughing, Maya and this stranger in uniform, but perhaps he was wrong, because by the time he got closer they both seemed annoyed. Maymay, he said a bit too loud, and hugged his daughter. It always took her some time to warm up to him, and he could understand that, no reason to take it personally. Photo ID, please, the flight attendant said in Hebrew, looking at Maya but obviously meaning him. So sorry I’m late, Avner said, and handed her his passport. It was the normal procedure, and her rudeness was normal, too, for an Israeli, and yet he couldn’t help but feel … criticized. Was this only about his lateness, or did Netta perhaps say something about him when she dropped Maya off? Sorry, Avner said again, although the woman had clearly heard him the first time; I’m really sorry.

  * * *

  Now it was five a.m., and Avner and Maya were making their way through the Penn Station crowd. Where were all these people rushing to so early in the morning? Avner was anxious that he would lose Maya. He tried again. Come on, why not give me your hand? But she’d said it earlier—his hand was sweaty. She made her cheek and shoulder meet, indicating her no-thank-you. Avner wished to find himself in a world where grown men could do that too, make their cheek and shoulder meet.

  He could see she was looking at his beret. Or was she? He might be imagining it, which would be Netta’s fault. When Netta called to announce that “the package has been shipped,” right before they hung up she said, Avner, one more thing. Don’t wear that silly hat, okay? It embarrasses her. What an awful word, embarrass. This isn’t Israel, Netta, he said; in New York, people wear whatever they want. People wear whatever they want in Tel Aviv, too, Netta replied, only here when you look ridiculous they tell you to your face. And then—she’s a little girl, Avner, and she’s getting to that age. Just don’t wear the hat. Avner exhaled into the phone. Netta, he said slowly, if my daughter wants to ask me something, she can ask me herself. Occasionally, since moving to New York, he was able to stand up to Netta in these small ways. You’re such a teenager, Avner, Netta said.

  * * *

  Maya was carrying a purple backpack, and he was carrying her TIME magazine duffel bag and his own suitcase. It was incredible, how long Netta managed to hang on to things like crappy duffel bags they’d gotten for free years ago. The weight of it made him twist as he walked, and he wanted to call Netta and ask if she was ever going to buy a trolley suitcase like a normal person. But he didn’t, of course, and what was new about that? They’d always been experts at not saying things to each other.

  * * *

  Maya seemed to be looking at the drops of sweat trickling down his forehead. It was genetic, this sweating; his father had sweated just this way before him—fast, face-first. You’ve been spared, little girl, he wanted to say, be grateful. But suddenly she wasn’t next to him. A split second of horror, as if he’d inhaled ice instead of air, and then he spotted her, three steps behind. Her pigtails were messed up from the plane, and she had stopped to undo them. His chest felt like it was a couple seconds ahead, already on its way to reach her. He quickly closed the gap between them. Need help with that? he asked. She raised her eyes as if seeing him for the first time, and pulled out the second hair tie, her face slightly twitching from the effort. She put both hair ties in her pocket, and he said, Maya, let me know when you need to stop, okay? I don
’t want to lose you. She nodded.

  They kept walking, but where? The signs all looked the same. Numbers, arrows, words. Signs in this country always confused him, and transportation hubs of all kinds were enormous; in Israel he’d have easily found his way by now. He turned his head to his side every few seconds, trying to keep his daughter in sight. It occurred to him how trusting she was, never doubting that he was leading them to the right place. He wanted to be worthy of that trust, but he also had the urge to teach her never to trust anyone unless she knew what to do if that person fucked up. He wanted to teach her that people very often fucked up.

  * * *

  Looking ahead, he saw the information booth. He stopped, and she immediately stopped as well. That way, he said, pointing and trying to sound authoritative. Maya followed him, but suddenly seemed suspicious. Two people were in line, and Avner and Maya stood behind them. That’s where the train’s supposed to be? Maya asked. How quick, these shifts, how sharp. Up until just now, at least he was the dad who knew how to get to the train. We’re very close, Avner said.

  * * *

  On the train, the Netta in his head was berating him for his bad judgment, the needlessness of this trip. Poor Maya, she was saying, being dragged like that after such a long flight. (In reality, when he told Netta about the plan for this visit she only said, Sounds nice, and he appreciated that.) An art collector calls, you go, he said to imaginary Netta now; that’s just how it is for artists in New York. He would look her straight in the eyes, too; what did she know about his life in New York? She hardly asked him anything anymore. You could have pushed her visit back a few days, he heard Netta say. With few words, she was winning the argument; Netta was incapable of losing. Because, yes, wouldn’t it have been better? Easier for Maya, easier for him. But he couldn’t bring himself to do it. It would have meant a shorter visit, three days lost. And he was seeing so little of her, it seemed criminal.