Three

by D. A. Mishani

  On Friday the school year began. She walked Eran to his school and stayed with him until the first bell rang, and then drove to work. What hadn’t left her in those first few days was the fear. She did not feel shame, nor did she feel betrayed—in fact, she thought that Gil didn’t owe her anything—there was just a fear that grew stronger and stronger, as though she’d been the victim of an extremely violent act.

  In the evenings she checked three times to make sure she’d locked the door and shut the windows, and she called her mother after Eran fell asleep, ostensibly to find out how she was. The only time she allowed herself to talk about it was with Sophie, who phoned a few days after she got back from the States, and that conversation helped her, but in an unexpected way. They met at a café on a Monday morning. She waited patiently while Sophie described the exhausting weekend standing in queue for rides at Disney World and the hotel in Miami and then, when Sophie asked how it was going with the guy Orna was dating, she confessed, “Not so well. I think he’s married.”

  Sophie was outraged. She had no doubt that Gil was married and that the woman at the mall was his wife. And she couldn’t understand why Orna wasn’t doing anything about it. “What am I supposed to do?” Orna asked, and Sophie said, “What are you supposed to do? Go to the police, or at least post something on Facebook—what do you mean?!” When Orna asked why she should go to the police, Sophie replied, “Because it’s rape, no less than that. It’s obvious. He lied to you so he could . . . You know very well why, and it doesn’t matter that you consented, because you didn’t know who he really was. If he’d told you he was a pilot, or a billionaire, it would have been the same thing.”

  But Orna wasn’t sure that was how she felt. Or that Sophie understood her and Gil’s relationship. More to the point, she felt that this wasn’t the issue—and certainly not the reason for her fear. She didn’t feel as if she had been raped. He was an asshole who’d lied to her, just like Sophie said, that was clear, but he hadn’t tried to force himself on her, and they probably wouldn’t have had sex to that day if she hadn’t initiated it, they’d just have had dinners and movies. What did he actually want from her? He hadn’t pressured her, hadn’t courted her; she was the one who’d contacted him through the site, and if she’d disappeared he wouldn’t have called her. So what was the whole production for? And the lies—if he had lied to her? And the stories he’d made up, like about his girls staying over at his place and the divorce agreement? She felt that the source of her fear was something different. That perhaps it had something to do with what had happened with Ronen. A delayed fear, repressed all this time, that she would never get over what had happened to her and would never find someone else. That she would be alone. And she thought that Ronen’s acts were far worse than Gil’s, because he’d also betrayed Eran and lied to him and then abandoned him, and she couldn’t go to the police to file a complaint against Gil. Hadn’t Ronen been lying when he’d said his overseas trips with tour groups weren’t driving them apart but in fact bringing them closer because they made him miss her? Hadn’t it taken him weeks, maybe months, to tell her about Ruth? And he, unlike Gil, did have an obligation to tell her the truth, if only because they had a child together.

  She told Sophie she wasn’t going to file a complaint. Sophie said, “I can’t understand you. Why would you let him get away with this? Besides, there’s no way this is the first time he’s done it, and it’s probably not the last either.” Orna replied, “Because it’s not my personality. Come on, how long have you known me?”

  Sophie said, “Then I wish it was your personality,” and Orna thought she was insinuating that if it had been, Ronen wouldn’t have left her either, but that was probably not what Sophie meant.

  Instead of going to the police, she sent Gil a text message one evening in early September:

  Aren’t you planning to apologize? Explain?

  She could tell that the message had been read, but Gil didn’t answer.

  7

  The days went by. It was mid-September. Everyone was back from their summer travels and planning their next trips for Sukkot in October. Eran’s year had started off rockier than the last one, and sometimes he refused to get out of bed in the morning. The transition from Year Four to Year Five was complicated and demanded more concentration and effort in class and at home. The teachers seemed less patient too. Orna met Eran’s new teacher, who tried to reassure her, insisting that lots of pupils struggled at the beginning of Year Five and Orna had nothing to worry about because they all had their fingers on the pulse. But Orna felt, perhaps unjustly, that the teacher’s words of encouragement concealed a note of criticism at her parenting, and that she might be hinting that Orna should get Eran diagnosed.

  Eran’s therapist also sensed difficulties. He thought it might be a delayed response to the crisis at home and suggested stepping up to two sessions a week, but she couldn’t ask her mother to pay for that. He didn’t ask about Gil, nor did she mention him. Her mother did ask about the lawyer she was dating, and Orna dismissed her: “Nothing came of it in the end.”

  Gil’s profile was still on the dating site, unchanged. “Forty-two years old, divorced once.”

  She didn’t log on often, because she felt it was all behind her and she knew she wouldn’t make contact again with anyone there. She deleted her own profile.

  Sophie suggested she open a Facebook account, since there were networks of friends, which made everything more transparent, and it was much harder to lie. But Orna resisted: lots of teachers said Facebook opened an unwanted door for students and parents, and also, she didn’t want her romantic efforts to be conducted in public. When she did go on the dating site and look at Gil’s profile, it was almost out of pure curiosity, to see if he’d changed anything. Once she even thought of creating a new account for herself, with a false name and a fake picture, which she would use to get in touch with him and see how he responded—would he try to get the conversation going the same way, and repeat the same stories he’d told her almost six months ago? But she assumed he would recognize her writing style, and there really wasn’t any point, either in that or in going to his flat (she thought she could find it even though she didn’t remember the address) to conduct stakeouts, as she had once considered doing.

  She remembered that the one and only time she’d been at his place, she’d sensed that something was wrong, even if she couldn’t say exactly what. What had she really felt that time? That it wasn’t his? Perhaps that no one lived there? There was no name on the door, only the flat number, and no food in the refrigerator. Gil had apologized and said he almost always ate out, even though he’d previously told her his girls sometimes came over for supper. The soap by the bathroom sink was dark and dried out, as if it hadn’t been used for weeks, but Gil was a man who washed his hands frequently. There were other things she’d noticed: no sign of the bike he’d told her about, either in the flat or downstairs, for example.

  When she thought back to that evening in his flat, for the first time in several days, Orna felt furious again, but this time it was accompanied not by fear but by detective-like curiosity. She texted Gil:

  I’ve been told to file a police complaint or tell your wife what you do when you’re out, or write the truth about you on the dating site, but I haven’t done it yet. Are you sure you don’t want to explain?

  She was surprised to find herself capable of such a firm and implicitly threatening tone.

  She saw that the message had reached him, and he answered after a few minutes:

  I’m glad you didn’t. Thanks. Can I call?

  For an instant the fear returned. She didn’t want to hear his voice or for him to hear hers. It was almost 11 P.M. and the next day she had to start teaching early, and she regretted texting him. She said she preferred that he not call, and he said he wanted to explain but since she’d removed her profile from the site he couldn’t write to her over chat. She concluded
from this that he’d searched for her on the site, and that he wasn’t completely indifferent to what had happened to her since they’d broken up.

  “Then explain here,” she wrote, and he answered, “Okay,” and then added, “but it’ll take a while.”

  She cleaned up the kitchen and the living room, and when she went in to shower she put her phone on the bathroom sink, under a towel to protect it from the heat and the steam. When she got into bed with the same book she’d taken on their weekend in Jerusalem, three long messages came in from Gil, probably because what he said couldn’t fit in one.

  He said he was sorry, he felt terrible about what had happened—“eating myself up”, that was the phrase he used—and he knew Orna couldn’t forgive him for what he’d done so he hadn’t even tried to explain himself after their chance meeting at Dizengoff Centre.

  He and his wife weren’t actually divorced but separated, but when he’d met Orna on the dating site they’d both been clear that they could see other people, and that they were headed for divorce. He hadn’t put that in his profile or told Orna all the facts because he knew women were reluctant to date men who who hadn’t finalized their divorce yet.

  A few weeks after they met and started going out, his father’s health had deteriorated and shortly afterwards he’d died, plunging Gil into a crisis, and he’d moved back in with his wife and the girls and agreed to give the marriage another chance, even though he knew it wasn’t what he wanted. Perhaps he’d also done so because he sensed that Orna wasn’t sure about their relationship and thought she was going to break it off. Of course he should have told her everything honestly, but he was ashamed and afraid, and it was hard for him to give her up. He understood that he’d hurt her and he apologized again, and would understand if she told his wife or spread the story some other way. Perhaps he even hoped that’s what she’d do, because then he’d have to stop living a lie and be done with this marriage once and for all.

  In the end he said he missed her, he hoped one day she would meet a man who deserved her and he envied the person she would allow into her life wholeheartedly. He knew it wasn’t him, not only because of what he’d done but also because from the day they’d met he’d felt he was not a man she would choose to live with, even if he really had been divorced.

  Orna read his messages twice that night, in bed. And once in the morning before Eran woke up. She felt she couldn’t believe a word he said, because there were so many things about his behaviour that the messages didn’t explain. Still, his words managed to close up at least part of the open wound, and mostly she felt that her response to the whole story had been correct.

  She started to write back to him in the morning, while she sipped her coffee, but nothing she wrote was accurate, so she didn’t send the message that day or in the following days. When she finally did, it was from a different place, and after many things had changed.

  8

  Ronen got in touch via Skype a week before Rosh Hashanah. It was just after seven, and she and Eran were eating supper. When she saw who was calling, she called Eran to the computer and told him to answer the call himself.

  They only talked for a few minutes, and while they did Orna waited anxiously in the kitchen. She could barely hear Eran’s voice because he always spoke quietly with Ronen. He came back to the kitchen and said Dad wanted to talk to her. It was hard for her to look at him on the screen. Ronen said, “Hi, Orna,” and smiled in a way that made her feel he’d been rehearsing the conversation. He asked if she would be available to talk privately after Eran went to bed. She said yes, and he thanked her. “So I’ll call you in a couple of hours, is that okay?”

  When she went back to the dinner table Eran announced: “Dad’s coming to visit on Sukkot. Did he tell you?”

  Ronen called back at ten, and she could tell by his punctuality that he wanted to tell her something she didn’t want to hear. At first she couldn’t figure out if the room she was seeing on the screen was an office or a home. There was a completely bare white wall behind Ronen, with a round paper lampshade in the upper-right corner of the screen. During their call a seven- or eight-year-old blond girl walked into the room, wearing green shorts and no shirt, peered straight at Orna with a curious look and asked Ronen something she couldn’t hear. He answered her in English: “Tell Thomas I’ll be there in ten minutes, okay?” The girl looked at Orna for another moment with her big pale-blue eyes, then left the frame.

  They were coming to visit in two and a half weeks, on Yom Kippur Eve. They—meaning all of them: Ronen, Ruth, and her four children, one of whom was the blond, shirtless girl. Her name was Julia. They would stay for almost a month, in a house they’d rented on his parents’ moshav. Ronen said he knew it wouldn’t be easy for everyone, but the main purpose of the visit, from his perspective as well as from Ruth’s and the kids’, was to spend time with Eran and to get to know him. Seeing his parents and other family was secondary. He didn’t know what the right way to go about it was, which was why he wanted to talk with her now. Obviously at first they should meet together, the three of them, at least once or twice, but afterwards he would like Eran to spend a few days on the moshav with him, Ruth and their children, maybe even all of Sukkot, when he’d be on school holidays. That was why they’d decided to come now, during the High Holy Days. For Eran.

  This was so like Ronen, and she told him so. Ostensibly he was coming for Eran, but he hadn’t even bothered to find out if the dates worked for them before he’d bought tickets. What if they’d planned to go away on Sukkot? Hadn’t it occurred to him to ask?

  Ronen became defensive. “But you’re not going away, are you?” he asked.

  Orna said that wasn’t the point and there were lots of things that needed to be figured out and Eran needed to be prepared, they couldn’t just drop this on him at short notice. “I mean, you don’t even have any idea what’s going on in his life,” she added.

  Ronen waited for her to calm down. He could never tolerate it when things got “heated.” In his house everyone was calm and there were no fights. Then he said quietly, “Orna, I understand that I’ve acted badly in the past few months and that everything’s fallen on your shoulders, but I want to start fresh with Eran. It’s important for him and for me. Think about it quietly and we’ll talk before we arrive, okay? I didn’t say anything to Eran about the moshav, and if it doesn’t work for you I’ll come to Holon every day and see him at your place, all right?”

  The fear that gripped her throat was as powerful as it had been on the day she’d met Gil with his wife, and the fury was the same fury, and that made her wonder if she’d actually been angry with Ronen at the time, not with Gil. Perhaps her anxiety had been not so much because of Gil and the fact that he’d lied to her, but because of what that miserable relationship said about her fate and her life. She fell asleep late and couldn’t remember her dream exactly, but she knew that the blond girl she’d seen with Ronen was in it, and that she’d been completely naked. She had to see Eran’s therapist urgently, but she didn’t call the next morning because she knew what he would say. Instead, she kept Ronen’s looming visit to herself and felt it eating her up from inside the way acid melts away skin, until she no longer had a choice because Eran’s weekly therapy session was approaching and she assumed he would say something.

  She was not mistaken.

  The therapist said they had to do everything slowly, “step by step,” and that of course he wanted to talk about the visit with Eran and hear what he was feeling, but that in general he saw it as “a very positive development.” Ronen wanted to be back in Eran’s life, he was willing to make a real effort and come to Israel for a relatively long period, he wanted to show Eran that there was a place for him in his new life and his new family, and that is exactly what the therapist had hoped would happen one day, and exactly what Orna had hoped for, wasn’t it?

  Orna found herself loathing the clinic. The parquet floor, th
e colourful carpets, the paintings on the walls, the books on little wooden shelves, the couch she sat opposite, covered with pillows embroidered in red and blue. The air conditioning that was always running, from April to October, as though electricity were free. How far this all was, how far all his pretty words were, from the difficulties of her life. She lost her temper: “I don’t know if I was hoping for this. Maybe you were. And I definitely didn’t want it to happen this way. Do you understand what he’s trying to do?”

  He—Ronen—wanted Eran to fit in with his “new family,” which she was not a part of. He wanted Eran to spend several days with them in their rented house on the moshav, without her. He wanted Eran to go to sleep, perhaps in the same room, with Ruth’s children and wake up with them in the morning. Maybe Ruth would be the one to wake them all and make them breakfast and then they would go out and play without their shirts on. And where would Orna be all this time? Alone at home?

  The therapist said, “But it was clear from the moment you decided to divorce, wasn’t it, Orna? It was a given. That Eran would have two families—one here with you, and one with his dad somewhere else. There is no way around that.”

  But she wanted to get around it, she had to get around it, she didn’t want Eran to have any family except hers. Why was that so hard to understand? Since talking to Ronen she’d had dreams in which Eran asked her if he could stay with his new family. She dreamed that he came home from the moshav and asked if he could go to Nepal with Ruth and Ronen and the kids. That he walked hand in hand with the blond girl from the screen and Orna never saw him again.