That was the only moment on the second date when Orna thought about Ronen and Eran. How different everything was with them. And for a moment she feared that her attempt to trap the despair and sorrow wouldn’t succeed and they would be visible on her face like smudged make-up. She reminded herself of what Eran’s therapist had said: Don’t pressure him, Orna, give the boy time. He’s on his way to overcoming the crisis, just like you are, even though you can’t see it yet.
This date went by quickly.
It was after midnight when they said goodbye because she had to get home. For some reason they didn’t kiss this time, even though at the moment of separation she wanted to smell Gil’s chocolatey cologne again.
That night, a little before one, he sent her a text message: “It was fun, Orna. Thanks.” And she responded, “Thank you.”
3
What surprised her was how patient he was.
At first she thought it was because he was going out with other women, but Gil said that after their second date he’d decided not to meet anyone else, so as to give it a real chance. He didn’t suspend his online profile or remove it, but she didn’t say anything about it so he wouldn’t think she was spying on him—or so he wouldn’t know that she was also still checking the site, without any real purpose, scanning new profiles as if she might be missing out on something.
May. Spring.
After one more date in April, in May they see each other three times.
At school it’s a busy time because of the upcoming matriculation exams. At home, Eran is talking about his birthday next month. Two hours before one of her dates with Gil the babysitter calls to say she can’t make it because she has a temperature, and Orna is about to phone Gil to cancel, but she changes her mind—she is desperate to get out, having spent days rushing from home to school and back again—so she asks her mother to watch Eran. She takes into account the fact that her mother will ask questions, and she does. Orna says she’s going out with Sophie, her good friend whom her mother knows well, but she puts on a smart, short dress, which surely makes her mother realize she’s lying.
She isn’t telling anyone about Gil for now, except Eran’s therapist, because there’s nothing to tell yet—she isn’t in love with Gil and there’s little going on between them—but perhaps also out of a conviction that if she doesn’t tell, something will happen. She once heard an author on TV explain why she never showed anyone what she was working on: when something is simmering, you have to keep the pot covered.
They still haven’t had any physical contact, apart from the occasional flutter of lips over cheeks. Is Gil dating other women after all? Most of the time she feels she is shutting herself off to certain thoughts and feelings and simply functioning, and that the dates with Gil are part of the attempt to function, to keep up the appearance of an ordinary life.
She wakes up in the morning to get herself and Eran ready for work and school, whispers, “Good morning, Erani,” and smiles while she strokes his black hair and watches him open his eyes. She teaches the usual material, prepares her students for their Hebrew grammar exam, helps Eran with his homework in the afternoons, tutors to make some extra money, and usually manages to cook something for supper. Every so often she goes out with this guy she met. Everything is fine. Nothing is broken. She and Gil have pretty similar tastes in food and movies, he doesn’t say anything that makes her feel embarrassed or ashamed about going out with him, he’s good-looking, she likes being seen with him on the street, his Hebrew is better than average, sometimes even higher and more correct than hers, he’s patient and courteous. In short, life goes on. She’s not falling apart.
But at other times the unhappiness, or the hopefulness, disrupt her efforts to feel that everything in her life is normal, and she is overcome with dread when she thinks about the fact that she is going out with a man who is not Ronen, and that these are the things she consoles herself with—that they both like sushi, that he’s not fat—as though within the course of a few weeks she has become a different woman, a much older one than she used to be.
Eran’s therapist promises her that beneath the surface, which she usually experiences as a total collapse, time is weaving together a new order, a new life. But Orna cannot feel for more than a few moments at a time that what he says is right.
On the evening her mother comes to babysit Eran, they go to a movie for the first time. Interstellar, at the mall. Orna is moved by the relationship between the father and daughter and can’t stop crying when the movie is over, because of Eran and Ronen. Afterwards they go to a Japanese restaurant and she tells Gil for the first time about Eran and Ronen.
Eran is a special child, she explains. Introverted and very vulnerable. He’s turning nine at the beginning of June. He’s a little short for his age, thin and extremely shy, with almost no friends. The nicest thing that’s happened to him recently is that he’s discovering that he has a sense of humour, and he uses it a lot. He tries to make people laugh, mostly her, and is overjoyed when he manages to. In class he isn’t brave enough yet. He is fascinated by aircraft—model aeroplanes, unmanned aircraft, drones, anything that flies. Lately he’s also discovered cars and has started to collect little models, mostly ones her mum buys him. He was always very close to Ronen, even though Ronen travelled for long periods of time. He was an overseas tour guide—actually, he still is, but now he lives in Nepal. And he hasn’t seen Eran even once since he came to Israel to sign the divorce papers in December.
For a second it seemed to Orna that Gil was about to put his hand on hers, which was on the table, and she hoped he wouldn’t do it at that precise moment. He hardly asked any questions because he realized how sensitive the topic was, and Orna told him what she could:
That Ronen had married a German woman named Ruth, who was three years older than him and had four kids, and that they lived in Kathmandu, where they ran a hostel. Ruth was pregnant.
That Ronen had promised not to cut ties and to come and visit Eran often, but he hadn’t come yet.
That they hadn’t even Skyped since the end of February.
“Doesn’t Eran ask about him? Does he talk to you about it?”
“Not to me. It’s as if he never had a dad. But he talks about him with his therapist, and I hope that’s enough.”
Ronen sent the alimony he owed, she told Gil when he asked. Or rather, his family did. His parents deposited money in her account every month and they also came to visit Eran once or twice a month, when they were in the area. She wanted to tell them not to come because she thought their visits only caused Eran pain, but his therapist asked him if he enjoyed the visits with Grandma and Grandpa and he said yes.
Was it because of what she told him that night that Gil was so patient with her? Then again, he’d always acted as if he had all the time in the world. He didn’t pressure her to see him and always let her initiate their dates. He always offered to pay but did not insist when she objected, and she demanded that they split the bill every time they ate something, allowing him to pay only if they’d just had drinks and the bill was small. He had money, that was implied by things he’d said on their first date, but he didn’t flaunt it. After one of their dates she spotted him getting into his car, a new-looking red Kia Sportage. And he did manage to surprise her sometimes, to make her feel there were things she didn’t know, that beneath his unremarkable exterior was a more interesting person. When they talked on the phone once, she asked, “How was your week?” and Gil said, “I got back from three days in Warsaw yesterday,” even though he hadn’t told her anything about taking a trip.
“Warsaw? Holiday or work?”
“Work. Why would anyone go to Warsaw on holiday?”
In the Japanese restaurant, after they’d talked about Eran and Ronen, she tried to change the subject and force herself to be more cheerful, to pull herself out of the descent. “So what do you do on the evenings we don’t meet, if you don�
��t mind me asking?”
Gil said he usually read. He got back from the office at around half past six or seven, eight if he went to the gym, and if the girls were at his place he spent time with them. Sometimes they had supper together, sometimes they watched the news or an episode of a TV series they liked. Now it was something awful called The Walking Dead, and he didn’t connect with zombies, but he watched it for their sake. If the girls weren’t there, or after they left, he generally just read. Before the divorce he hadn’t read much, but now, even though the two things were unrelated, he’d set himself a rule: after work, when he was at home, the computer was off and the mobile phone was silenced. He read non-fiction, biographies, books about espionage, about the Mossad, about World War II, but also popular-science books, like Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens, which Orna had also read. He never watched TV alone, not for ideological reasons but because he’d decided it was a waste of time and that books were much better for clearing his mind after work. Orna was ashamed that she’d assumed he was the more superficial one, even though she hadn’t opened a book for over a year, except the ones she read to Eran.
He’d replaced the sweet-chocolatey cologne with something sharper, which she disliked, but they were not at the stage where she could say anything about it. Once during one of their dates, and another time later that night, she briefly thought about him without his clothes on and pictured him standing before her naked. His torso was probably fairer and fuller than Ronen’s, not hairy, and his legs less thin and muscular, but maybe slightly longer. She hoped his chest was brawny and not soft. In her imagination, she was almost naked, wearing only her panties, but even in her fantasy they did not touch, only examined each other from a short distance, in a room that was not her bedroom or any other room she recognized. But there was the possibility of touching in the way they stood together, a sense that one body touching another was possible.
The most surprising thing that occurred between them in May was the phone calls.
It started in the middle of the month, a few days after their fourth date, which was at an expensive fish restaurant at Tel Aviv Port. As on previous occasions, they didn’t plan what would happen afterwards, did not agree to meet again, and one evening, after reading to Eran and cleaning up the kitchen and sitting blankly at the computer, she turned on the TV, watched a few dreadful minutes of Big Brother and thought about Gil in his flat, maybe reading. She turned off the TV and sent him a text message, but he didn’t reply, and she remembered he’d told her he tried to keep his phone off in the evenings. Then, for some reason, she called him, not from her mobile but from the landline.
Gil answered immediately, even though he couldn’t have recognized the number. He hadn’t turned off his phone because his younger daughter, Hadass, was still at his place, but he hadn’t seen Orna’s message.
“So should I call later?” she asked, and he said, “No, hang on a second. I’m going to the other room.”
The phone conversations were short. And they had no clear purpose. They happened once every three or four days, mostly if they weren’t getting together, and always on her initiative. Gil said he wouldn’t turn his phone off any more in the evenings, he would just put it on silent, and every time she called he answered. She noticed that she always used her landline, as if reconstructing an experience she remembered from her youth: she was fourteen and had her first boyfriend, Sharon Lugasi from the other class, but she didn’t have a phone in her room yet. In order to talk to him privately, she would take the phone from the living room, plug it into the socket in her room and lock herself in. Usually his mother answered and she would ask a question no one asks any more: “Hello, is Sharon at home?”
In those days, too, not unlike in her conversations with Gil, she was unsure why they were talking on the phone at all. They spent all day at school together and didn’t have much to say, yet still those phone calls were essential to what was going on between them, even if they consisted mostly of silence.
With Gil there were no silences.
“So how was work? Did you pop over to Moscow and back?”
“Not today. I was in the office all day.”
“No gym? I hope for your sake you skipped lunch at least.”
“No, I didn’t make it to the gym. The girls let me know they were both coming and they wanted supper. Maybe first thing tomorrow. I really need to.”
“Are you reading?”
“Not yet. How are you? How’s Eran?”
Hearing him say Eran’s name flooded her with ambivalence, even aversion. It bothered her that she wasn’t telling Eran any more details about Gil and their dates, and kept saying she was going out with a friend. Her mother had already asked if she was seeing someone, but she’d refused to answer.
She hadn’t told him that these talks reminded her of those phone calls with Sharon Lugasi. She didn’t want him to misinterpret her.
After ten or fifteen minutes she took advantage of a lull and said, “Well, goodnight,” and he said, “Goodnight.”
4
Eran’s birthday was at the beginning of June.
Orna took a risk: instead of inviting the class to the usual Friday-afternoon party at a local park or at home, which would give parents two child-free hours without much hassle, she had planned a kite-flying party on the beach in Rishon Le’Zion, so that parents would have to drive their kids there and back during siesta time. One parent suggested she rent a minibus, but Orna didn’t want that responsibility, and the expenses had already ballooned into much more than she could afford. She did set up a WhatsApp group to help coordinate pickups, and promised the parents cold beer and watermelon if they wanted to stay at the beach instead of driving back and forth.
The party was at half past four, and Orna was there at three, with Eran and her mother and the lovely school counsellor, who had supported Eran since the divorce and was trying to help him integrate socially; she brought her boyfriend to help set up. Orna had invited Ronen’s parents, even though she didn’t have to, but they said no. She assumed they were worried about feeling uncomfortable and didn’t want to see her mother. They promised to have a separate family party for Eran at their house.
They set out folding tables and put out the food and drinks. At half past three the big straw mats and beanbags she’d rented were delivered, and at four the party entertainer arrived with a crew of three secondary-schoolers. Eran was busy with the drone that Orna’s mother had not been able to resist giving him, even though his actual birthday was only the next day. When the batteries ran out, he helped arrange the snacks. The only thing they couldn’t plan was the wind. At twenty to five there were only three kids, and Orna’s mother shot her worried glances, but at ten to five most of the other children arrived, in four cars, and the party started. Twenty-eight out of a class of thirty-three had turned up, and two had told her in advance they wouldn’t make it. She didn’t have time to think about it during the party, but that evening, when they opened the presents at home, she felt overwhelmed with gratitude to the parents, the children, the entertainer, even her mother, and everyone who had helped her make this the best birthday Eran had ever had. It was proof not only of her organizational skills but of how much the kids and parents loved Eran and saw him as an integral part of the class despite him being so introverted and reclusive. It also indicated their willingness to help him through the crisis. She did not discuss the divorce with most of the parents, but they all clearly knew what she and Eran were going through.
The entertainer divided the kids and those parents who wanted to participate into four groups, and they assembled and decorated the kites. They finished at about quarter to six, and since the wind was too low, they ate the food and lit the candles on the cake. Orna had made lists, but she’d forgotten to bring a chair to hoist Eran up on. One of the dads suggested a beanbag, and that was even better because Eran lay in it with his head lolling back and his eyes on the sky while
they swung him up in the air ten times. When the sun started to set, the wind picked up and the kites flew like giant butterflies, drawing curious onlookers, who gathered around them on the beach. Even Orna’s mother had to admit that it had been a good idea and that Orna’s insistence on a beach party had been justified, and when she handed a cheque to the entertainer at the end of the party, she did so without haggling or giving everyone the impression that she was being exploited, the way she usually did. All in all, they spent almost two thousand five hundred shekels on the party.
On Saturday they had a quiet day at home.
Eran woke up early and came into her bed to wake her, and she sang “Happy Birthday,” whispering into his ear. She gave him the simple gift she’d bought, after much deliberation and consultation with the therapist: a notebook with thick, blank pages, in a leather binding that fastened with a string, where he could write the date at the top of each page, followed by what he’d done and seen and thought that day. He ran to his room and came back to her in the kitchen after a few minutes to show her what he’d written. She hadn’t explained that you were supposed to start on the first page, and he’d filled a page in the middle of the book with large green felt-tipped letters: “It’s my 9 birthday. Mum boat me a notebook. Maybe dad will fone on the computer.” For lunch she made his favourite dish—chicken liver with fried onions and mashed potatoes—and they ate together with her mother, who brought another chocolate cake, this one without candles.
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