“Didn’t he call to say happy birthday?” Orna’s mother asked, and Orna didn’t answer, just kept clearing the dishes and loading the dishwasher. She was amazed to hear her mother murmur from the dining table, “That bastard.” Eran was watching TV in his room.
She’d consulted Eran’s therapist about how to broach the topic of his dad not being there for his birthday, and the therapist had said he thought Ronen should be compelled to at least phone. So she’d swallowed her pride and sent him an email and a Skype message, for the first time in months: “I hope you remember that it’s Eran’s birthday on Saturday. It would really help if you called to say happy birthday.” Ronen didn’t write back, but she hoped he’d seen the messages.
Her mother left in the afternoon, and then it was just the two of them. She suggested they go to a movie, but Eran said he’d rather stay home, and she realized he was waiting for Ronen to call. They played Monopoly in the living room and then Eran shut himself in his room again and watched TV, and she marked exams. Skype was on and active every time she glanced at it. And there was nothing wrong with the internet. She felt her hatred mounting and tried to control it, because it wouldn’t help Eran and in fact would only hurt him. She mustn’t let Ronen ruin the fact that she had given Eran two blissful days, that she’d managed to do it even under these circumstances, alone, or rather with the help of people who loved them.
In the evening, before reading a story, she said more or less what she’d agreed with the therapist she’d say in case Ronen didn’t get in touch: “Dad hasn’t been able to call yet, but I’m sure he’ll talk to you soon, and I know he’s thinking about you and about how you’re already nine. You know there’s a big time difference between us and where Dad is, right? It might be because of that. Anyway, you know Dad loves you very, very, very much, right?”
She wanted to call Ronen and curse him the way her mother had, but it was pointless. He wouldn’t answer. Instead she tried Gil, but his phone was off. The last time they’d talked, on Tuesday evening, she’d told him about the party preparations, and before hanging up she’d said, “We’ll probably only talk afterwards.” On Friday he’d texted her first thing in the morning: “Good luck today! And happy birthday to both of you.”
She had to talk to someone, so she called Sophie, and within a minute she was bawling, offloading all the week’s tension. Sophie’s husband, Itzik, was home and Sophie said she could come over, even though it was late. She lived five minutes away, and at quarter to ten she was there, wearing a tracksuit. They talked about Ronen, and Sophie told Orna exactly what she wanted to hear—whispering, so Eran wouldn’t wake up: that it was hard to believe what a shit he was, that no one could have imagined he’d turn into such a louse, and that he didn’t deserve an amazing son like Eran.
That was comforting.
And that was when, without meaning to, Orna told her about Gil.
Sophie had said, “God will compensate you for that shit, I’m sure someone good will come along eventually,” and Orna amazed her by saying, “I may already be going out with someone, I’m not sure. But I think I am.”
Sophie couldn’t believe Orna hadn’t mentioned it yet, and she wanted to know everything. Orna told her some things that were not easy to tell. That they’d met on a site for divorced singles and had gone out seven or eight times. That they talked on the phone every so often. Sophie wanted to see what he looked like, and since Orna didn’t have a picture on her phone, Sophie said, “No problem, we’ll find him on Facebook.” It was strange that Orna had never thought to do that, but then again she wasn’t on Facebook herself. They logged on to Sophie’s account, searched for “Gil Hamtzani,” in Hebrew and in English, in various spellings, but couldn’t find him. Then Orna remembered they could see his pictures on the dating site and she clicked on his profile. Sophie remarked, “Not bad-looking, but he’s a bit old, isn’t he?”
They flipped through a few more profiles, just out of curiosity. “These guys are pretty cute,” Sophie decreed. “Maybe I should get divorced too.” Then she asked, “So, is it serious?”
Orna replied, “I have no idea. How do you even know? I think I’ve forgotten.”
Her mood was improved. Gil was no longer a secret, and she felt that this somehow brought them closer. She admitted that they hadn’t had sex or even kissed, and Sophie exclaimed, “Well then, how exactly are you expecting to know? Sleep with him, then we’ll talk!” Orna laughed. It was like a conversation between secondary-school girls, even though they hadn’t known each other in high school and had only become friends much later, through the boys. Eran and Tom, Sophie’s eldest, had been in the same nursery school and then kindergarten, but Tom was on the spectrum and they’d sent him to a special-needs school.
And the next day it happened.
Gil wasn’t available all Sunday, which was unusual for him, and he only called her back at six. He asked how the party had been, and she told him it was a big success. When she mentioned that she’d been trying to get hold of him since the day before, he surprised her again. It turned out that he’d made a spontaneous decision—partly because he knew she’d be busy with Eran’s birthday and they wouldn’t be able to meet—to go on a bike-riding trip in Cyprus for a long weekend with friends from his cycling group. A spot had opened up when someone had cancelled at the last minute, and he’d decided to go for it and did not regret the decision. They’d cycled a beautiful route, from the peak of the Troodos Mountains all the way to the coastal town of Paphos, through pine forests and ancient villages. They’d had great food and stayed in a lovely hotel in Paphos. He said all his muscles ached, and she assumed he wouldn’t want to meet, but when she asked he said he just needed to check with the girls, because they might be coming for dinner, and he’d get back to her soon. At half past six he texted: “I rescheduled with the girls for tomorrow. Want to meet at nine?”
And she knew this would be a different date even before they met.
Not because of him, because he would probably have kept going the same way as before, but because she felt different. Everything blended and came together: the fact that Gil was no longer a secret because she’d talked about him out loud with Sophie; Eran’s birthday, which had gone off without a hitch; the fact that Ronen hadn’t called or answered her messages; the way Sophie had been matter-of-fact about her dating someone and at times had even seemed jealous.
Gil’s face was suntanned from riding, and he looked younger, in a red T-shirt. She really did feel happy to see him. They went to an Asian restaurant in the food market at Tel Aviv Port. They sat at the bar, so their knees touched every so often—his in blue jeans, hers bare, because the dress she wore hiked up when she sat down.
She felt free of secrets and prohibitions and guilt. She amplified her sense of freedom by trying to speak openly and directly, and every so often she put her hand on his knee. After telling Gil in great detail about the party, because he asked her to, and after he had shown her pictures on his phone of the views they’d seen on the ride—from a website, because he hadn’t taken any pictures himself—she said to him, without knowing she was going to say it, “Can I ask you a hypothetical question?” Gil said hypothetical questions were lawyers’ favourite kind.
“What does one do in this situation usually, when you want to be together . . . you know, intimately?”
It took him a minute to understand. “Do you mean, where do we go? Which home?”
She said, “Mmmhm,” and he looked surprised. It was as if they’d never met as man and woman before, and now it was a real date.
“You usually go to one person’s flat.”
But she didn’t want to go to his place. Both because she felt it was too early and because she was afraid one of his daughters would show up unannounced. Her place wasn’t an option, even though she’d considered it briefly when she’d asked her mother to have Eran sleep over and take him to school the next morning.
“So where do you go? A car? The beach? Hypothetically, of course.”
Gil stammered, said it depended, and when she asked where he’d gone with other women he’d dated, he said a hotel was an option.
She was reluctant at first. How had she not thought of that? “A hotel with hourly rates? Like in the movies? Isn’t that a bit sleazy?”
“I don’t know what kind of movies you mean, but it doesn’t have to be an hourly hotel. It could be any hotel in Tel Aviv. You get a room for the night.”
After the initial aversion, she actually liked the idea, though she wasn’t sure why. “So what do you think? Isn’t it time for us?” she said.
“I hope so. But are you sure about tonight? My muscles are still a bit stiff from cycling . . . And isn’t it late for you?” She wanted to be home by one or two at the latest, so she could get in a few hours’ sleep before teaching, but it was only ten. She asked if he knew any hotels, and she could tell the question embarrassed him. He said, “There are signs all over town, and we could also look online.” She searched on her phone.
He drove there in his Kia Sportage and she in her old Suzuki. She could still have changed her mind on the way, but she didn’t. On the contrary, she was anxious to get into the hotel room, to be with him in bed, to sleep with him so she would know what it was like, to sleep with him so that it would be behind her.
And the hotel surprised her.
It was small, located on an ordinary residential street, but it looked like a hotel. With a narrow, cosy lobby and clean carpeting, two bookshelves and a coffee-and-tea station, and a couple of Chinese or Japanese tourists waiting for a taxi on a brown leather couch.
She was the one who’d initiated, who’d pressed, who’d been daring, not because she’d decided to be but because she’d been possessed of a vague knowledge that this was the only way it would happen, the only way she would feel she wanted it.
She turned to him as soon as the door shut behind him and kissed him, pressed up against him, and lifted her dress above her waist to feel him rubbing against her. Then she pulled him to the bed and took off his shirt and touched his soft back, and when he took off his trousers before she could, she began to feel herself leaving the room for a moment. But she quickly brought herself back in by putting her hand on his and saying, “Not yet, wait a second.”
The room was an ordinary hotel room, where any tourist looking for something not too fancy could sleep: parquet floor, white sheets, black-and-white photograph of Tel Aviv in the fifties, medium-sized Toshiba television on the wall. A dark curtain hid a window that she later discovered looked out on the peeling, shabby wall of a dilapidated block of flats that was too close, with pipes and cables and old air-conditioning units.
She thought it would take her time to get used to his skin, which was too light and soft, and to the many birthmarks on his back and shoulders, but she knew she could become familiar with this body.
Gil was gentle, sometimes too gentle, touching her hair more than she would have liked, and he didn’t kiss her neck and stomach enough, but all in all the sex wasn’t bad, for a first time. He came inside her, wearing a condom, and she didn’t come, and when he asked if she wanted him to go on with his finger she said, “Not right now. Maybe later.” His eyes were open all the time, searching for hers, and she thought about how she’d never been with a man who didn’t shut his eyes during sex even once.
Gil went to the bathroom right afterwards to shower, locking the door, and Orna turned on the reading lamp and looked at her phone to see if there were any messages from her mum—and then for an instant she saw her body. Her feet, her toenails painted black, her pubic hair, which she hadn’t shaved for a long while, her thick, dark nipples.
She did think about Ronen, too, but her main thought was something else: Eran is asleep in the room where I grew up, in my mother’s house, and Ronen is in Nepal with a German woman named Ruth. And I am here, in a hotel room in Tel Aviv, after having sex with a man. With Gil. Maybe it’ll happen again and maybe not. We fell apart but I am whole.
There was another thought too: Ronen remembered her body from when she was twenty-five, and thirty, the body before the pregnancy and the body after childbirth, and when she slept with him she was an amalgamation of all those bodies, as if the memory of them were with them in bed. For Gil, though, this body she had now—this stomach, these feet, these breasts—was the only body she had, the way it was today, the way she was today. She didn’t know if that was good or bad.
Gil didn’t say much, as though he were a bit stunned. He came out of the shower after a long time, and when she went in there was hardly any shampoo or shower gel left in the bright little bottles. He walked her to her car, but they didn’t kiss. Orna asked, “Are you sure you’re okay?” and he said he was. His back and leg muscles hurt. He said he hadn’t thought this was going to happen today, and she said she hadn’t either. There was a new sort of intimacy, even in the way they walked next to each other on the narrow, dark Tel Aviv street to the car. Then Gil said, “It feels strange for you to go back to your place now, and me to mine. It’s almost 2 A.M. Are you sure you don’t want to come over?”
She didn’t.
And she said, “So we’ll talk tomorrow?”
5
They did talk the next day. And in fact almost every day for the next couple of weeks. They met at least once a week, mostly at the hotel and once in his flat. It was as if they were trying to intensify things, to test themselves and their relationship, turning up the heat to know if they should let the dish keep cooking. Yet despite the frequent meetings, she still wasn’t sure, and she vacillated between thinking it should go on and feeling like a stranger with Gil. She liked the hotel. Sunshine Beach Hotel. The hours they spent there were like the short trips overseas that Orna had grown accustomed to when she’d worked as a flight attendant, which she’d been missing dearly in the past few years. White sheets that someone else laundered and smoothed over the large bed. Heavy curtains that concealed the same view from every room. Her mother stayed with Eran overnight once, and Orna and Gil slept in the hotel and ate breakfast next to a pair of older tourists, sunburnt Germans who tried to strike up a conversation with them. Orna didn’t know what to tell them, and wondered if they realized what she and Gil were doing there or if they assumed they were husband and wife, but Gil chatted comfortably in English, advising them to take a taxi to the Dead Sea rather than a bus or a hired car. When they asked where he and his wife were from, he said they were Israeli but had been living in Europe for a few years and were here for a visit. Then he smiled at her the way Eran sometimes did when he managed to “pull one over on Grandma.”
He suggested they meet in his flat, and Orna continued to refuse until one evening, after a movie, they went to the hotel and there were no rooms available. It was in the early summer and Tel Aviv was already full of tourists. Gil promised there was no chance the girls would be at his place or turn up unannounced. He’d already told her that he’d asked them to call from now on before they came, and he’d even offered to take the keys back from them if it would reassure her. She agreed to go, but she felt uncomfortable in the flat. It was clean, probably because he had a cleaner, but it hadn’t been renovated for a long time and was full of dated furniture. It felt like being in someone’s recently deceased parents’ flat: old wooden sideboard in the living room, glass-doored cabinet with porcelain figurines, well-worn sofa facing a huge flat-screen television. She’d never been in a divorcé’s home before, but she had somehow imagined it differently, partly because he’d told her that he’d put quite a bit of money into it. The girls’ rooms were almost empty. Light-coloured kids’ beds with matching desks, and that was it. In one of them she spotted a football. The bed in Gil’s room was old, and there was a dressing table. The bedroom window looked out on to a pretty inner courtyard with lots of trees.
And nothing became any clearer. The s
econd time they slept together Gil was more confident and his erection was stronger and lasted longer, and she wondered if he’d taken Viagra, even though she’d never had sex with a man on Viagra before. He still touched her hair more than she would have liked, and she had not grown accustomed to his body even after the fifth or sixth time—although she did manage to come with him from the third time. There was something spongy about his body, not fat but too soft, not muscular. After he came he hurried to the bathroom to wipe himself off and shower, and she couldn’t help remembering Ronen, who used to get philosophical after they slept together, as if sex put him deeper into himself and into the world. He could lie on the bed for hours afterwards, talking, without moving or getting dressed or wiping off the semen or sweat. He was shorter than Gil but thin and very dark—he had the body of an anorexic dancer, as she told him after one of their first times—and his hair had hardly changed since the day they’d met. Black, long, tied in a ponytail at the back of his neck. Three years ago the first silver hairs had started to appear.
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