There were relationships I’d be more than happy to finish, for example, the ‘fake’ friendship with Oren and Hila. Hila would celebrate after hearing about what I’d done, which would just make her saintliness shine in contrast to a dirty and treacherous woman like me.
Despite all the pain of the separation from Manny, there was also something liberating about it. Suddenly, I didn’t feel I was lying all the time. I was more available at work, more available for the girls and more available for Itay.
I felt that, before I left my home and family, I had to check very carefully to see if there really was no chance of salvaging my relationship with Itay. I’d spent almost half of my life, and most of my adult life, with this man. I knew that, even without considering the impact on the girls and everyone around me, leaving him would be difficult. Itay and I had grown up together, built a house together, and we had already passed so many happy and stressful moments together.
I tried to remember when we had started dating, the time when we had been crazy in love with each other, when we couldn’t keep our hands off each other and each touch had sent an electrical current through my body.
The memories made me feel bad because our relationship really had been good once, and it hurt me that we were so far away now. And it wasn’t that I hadn’t tried. So many times, I had tried to get close and go back to being what we were, but it just hadn’t worked. Itay always said that was how it was with everyone - that there was no reason to cling to the past and that we should simply enjoy the present. But the present was so dreary. I couldn’t remember the last time Itay complimented me… or the last time he’d looked at me with that look that Manny had when I danced for him in the hotel room in Eilat. I wasn’t only being nostalgic. I really tried to revive the present with Itay, but I just didn’t get anywhere. Were all couples this way? Did everyone else’s love die? If so, then why should I put myself out for Manny? If love always dies, then our love would die someday too.
Maybe the best method was to find a new, exciting love every few years. Maybe those Hollywood actors who switched partners every so often knew something we didn’t know.
I wasn’t sure love always died. There were also examples of the opposite. I also wasn’t sure that the love between my husband and me had just died on its own. I felt it had been killed by Itay.
So if love inevitably ends, I’d just break my daughters’ hearts for no reason if I divorced Itay. I went back to thinking about Shira and Yarden.
Ultimately, they were my main consideration.
I didn’t know what it was like to be a daughter of divorced parents, and I didn’t know too many children of divorced parents. In religious society, divorce may not be rare, but it also wasn’t very common. I only remembered that when I was a child and heard my parents fighting, I was horrified, in case they got divorced.
As I grew older, that anxiety evaporated because I didn’t worry about it anymore and also because they stopped fighting at some point. Most couples who have many small children will fight sometimes, I supposed. Perhaps they did so because they have small children. Maybe that was why Manny was so calm. He had adult children. So all I needed to do was wait for about a decade and a half and everything would work out.
But why should I have to wait fifteen years? Why couldn’t I be happy today? Who knew what would happen in that time? Maybe I wouldn’t be happy even then, and I’d have just missed out on Manny’s amazing love.
I kept thinking: should I be happy and hurt my girls as a result, or be resentful and be a wife and mother to my family?
My argument had always been that if the mother wasn’t happy, the kids weren’t happy. Would my happiness be certain to come only at the expense of theirs?
I tried to get into the particulars. Except for a few nights a week, when Itay came home before they fell asleep and the weekends he spent with them, what would really be different for them if I lived apart from Itay? On Saturday mornings, we were already used to him going out alone with the girls. And until my breakup with Manny, I used those mornings to go over to see him, which meant we didn’t spend much time together anyway.
I once heard about children who suddenly got more quality time with their father once he’d divorced their mother because he had to take them out twice a week. Maybe divorcing Itay would only be good for everyone?
I knew that it wouldn’t, certainly not in the beginning.
Meanwhile, I continued to walk around with Manny's ring in my bag. I had no answer. I felt bad for him. I knew he wouldn’t wait forever. Not that he had women waiting in line for him, but at some point I knew he would stop waiting for me.
After two or three weeks, I texted him, I didn’t dare call, that I thought about him all the time and hoped he was still waiting. He replied that he was waiting and loved me.
Some mornings I thought, Today I’ll do it, I’ll leave today, and there were other mornings when I couldn’t believe I was even thinking about it.
No one knew what was happening to me. I looked very busy, but I guess everyone thought I was busy because of work and because of Yarden’s fifth birthday, which was in February.
I was very busy, and that was the only thing that helped me get up every morning and not sink into a rut. Of course, my boss was delighted. One of my colleagues had gone on maternity leave, and I was a tame workhorse who could take on her workload. One Thursday in late February, my boss asked me to deal with another one of her cases. He had given the case to someone else initially, but the substitute had something more urgent, so at the last minute, they put me on the case. I don’t like having cases tossed into my lap, but my boss knew I was great at improvisation.
I didn’t have much time to prepare. I only knew it was a group of engineers planning on breaking away from their main company to set up on their own. I was to meet with the group to work on the company's initial legal requirements and the allocation of shares with them. I wasn't in the mood for this meeting because the founders of the new company weren’t lawyers, but engineers who didn’t understand a thing about securities regulations and corporate law.
I knew that the meeting would be long and tedious and that I’d have to explain each item.
Ilana, the secretary, buzzed to let me know my guests were waiting for me in the conference room. First, I went to the bathroom. I knew the meeting would be a long one. I organized myself and washed my face.
I walked into the conference room. Nothing prepared me for what awaited me there.
Right in front of me sat Eric Rubin.
CHAPTER 18
For years, I’d saved a place in my heart for Eric, my charming tennis instructor, with whom I had been in love with from the age of seventeen, a love that had disappeared from my life when he left Israel with his wife when I was twenty and he had moved to Holland and out of my life.
Or so I had thought.
There’s something about an unfulfilled love that stays with you. What had never really started, had never ended. For years, I’d fantasized about him, even during the good times with Itay, and definitely during the bad times. I was intrigued to know where he was, what was going on with him, and most of all, what might have happened if we hadn’t been so hesitant all those years ago. I’d even searched for his name online from time to time. I didn’t find anything.
Now, nearly fifteen years since the last time we’d seen each other, here we were, bumping into each other, and on my home turf.
During the years in which I fantasized about meeting Eric again, I’d also feared meeting him. I was afraid that if Eric, who, in my memory, was my ideal man, suddenly showed up as an elderly man, my fantasy would shatter within minutes. Eric had, indeed, grown older. He was not an old man, but nor was he a man in his thirties either. He was a man of forty-five. I was afraid he’d be bald or fat by now; he actually had less hair and was more full-figured than I remembered, but he was still - obviously - a very impressive man. I was very worried about how I looked. He was still tall and strong, but I was
no longer that skinny girl that he had known fifteen years ago. I was a woman who had given birth… twice.
"Sharon!" he said, his eyes wide with disbelief as I entered the room.
"Eric?" I asked, surprised. The question was unnecessary. I recognized him as soon as I entered the room.
"Sure. What - you don’t remember me?"
"What are you doing here?" I asked and immediately regretted the silly question.
"It turns out we have a meeting with you," he smiled, flashing his white teeth.
I smiled back and sat down. After we explained the connection between us to the rest of the people present, our meeting began. Eric was friendly and nice, but nothing in his behavior or his speech hinted at the old love we’d shared. Maybe it was all in my head, I thought. Maybe I’d spent all these years reminiscing about memories that might not have occurred. The perfectly politically-correct attitude I received from him throughout the meeting helped me get a hold of myself after the initial shock, and I even enjoyed waving my knowledge and professionalism in front of Eric, whom I’d seen last when I was a young soldier. It was evident that I impressed him with my professional abilities as a lawyer.
Eric and his two partners were, quite probably, good engineers, but it took considerable effort to explain the legal and contractual implications of the split from the company and the establishment of a new one. Luckily, I also got to meet the accountant of the new company, who helped me a bit in terms of procedural matters with the tax authorities.
After more than two exhausting hours, I was tired, and my throat ached from talking non-stop. One of the partners had to leave, the accountant also left, and it was decided that the meeting would resume next week. It was evident that Eric was in no rush. When everyone had gone, he walked me to my office, made himself comfortable and looked curiously at the diplomas decorating the wall.
"So, Sharony," he said, smiling and speaking to me with familiarity, “you’re a lawyer now."
"Once I realized I wasn’t going to win a grand slam, I needed to take a different direction." I smiled, and Eric laughed. He understood the joke because he remembered that I was a mediocre tennis player at best.
"Maybe you weren’t a great tennis player, but you’re a terrific lawyer," he said.
"Thank you, thank you," I replied. "You're probably a pretty good engineer if this new company is willing to invest in you," I replied back.
"The truth is that the main brain is Yaniv, the guy who had to go. I was lucky to be in the right place at the right time," he confessed.
"So what’s been going on with you?" The last time I’d seen him he was going to Holland for three years with his pregnant wife.
"How long has it been?" he asked, trying to work out how many years he had to tell me about. I was disappointed. I remembered the number accurately because every few months, I’d remember him and calculate how long it had been.
"Almost fifteen years," I replied.
"Wow, so much time!"
I smiled. "Yes. Time flies when you’re having fun."
"I wouldn’t say that I had all that much fun."
"That’s why you came back from Holland?"
"Wow, Holland… What a memory you have!" I suddenly regretted showing such great knowledge of his life. Here I was, remembering every second of our last meeting and he barely seemed to remember that he’d moved to Holland.
"I have the memory of an elephant."
"We planned to go to Holland for four years or so, as I recall."
Three, I thought to myself, but I didn’t want to look more pathetic than I already did. "You didn’t go in the end?"
"No… I mean, yes. That is, we went to Holland, but our branch moved to Austria after a year, so we moved to Austria, and after four years, we returned to Israel."
"Why?" I asked in amazement. I would have died to have the chance to live in Europe, but Itay wouldn’t even speak the word ‘relocation.’ "After five years in Europe, you must have settled in really well… become accustomed to the culture and language."
"The truth is, I had difficulty with the language until the day I left. Marina, my wife, got on well with it."
"So?"
"We couldn’t tolerate the weather."
"The weather?" I asked in amazement. "In Israel you want to kill someone because of the heat!"
"I’d rather cook all day long here in a heat wave than spend one more winter in Europe."
"Really?"
"Yes, really. It's just awful. But that wasn’t the main thing. We also had a hard time with the social and mental isolation. We didn’t fit in, and we missed our family. Every year they extended my contract, so we just kept going. But, finally, we asked to come back."
I did a quick calculation in my head. He’d returned to Israel about a year before I’d finally quit the tennis club. "Why didn’t you come back to the club?"
"Are you still practicing?"
"Not for years now, but if you returned in ’99, I was still there."
"We came back at the end of ‘99, but we moved to Galilee. I’ll admit, it was a little hard to say goodbye to the green, mountainous landscapes we were used to."
"And you didn’t come to say hello to Haim and Rebecca ever?" I asked, as if I visited them every week.
"Actually, I did, a few years ago. Why have you given up practicing?"
"It was, maybe, the beginning of 2001 - I got pregnant, and I was afraid that a tennis ball would hit me in the stomach."
"You have children?" he asked in amazement. To him, I was still a twenty-year-old soldier and not a thirty-four-year-old lawyer.
"Two girls."
"How old?"
"Shira’s a little over seven and Yarden turned five last week."
"Big girls."
"True. How many children do you have?" I knew he had kids because the last time I saw him with Marina, she was about to give birth at any moment.
"Four."
"A very large family."
"Marina loves children."
"And you don’t?"
"I love them a lot, but I could make do with three."
"I’m satisfied with two."
Eric glanced at his watch.
"Are you in a hurry?"
"The truth is that I’m not, but I am starving. It’s already after three, and I’ve eaten almost nothing today."
"Want to go out to eat?"
"Gladly."
I checked that I had nothing important on my calendar. I didn’t know how long I’d be with Eric. I called and told Ahuva that I might be late today. I also called Itay and asked him to try to come home early because I was sure to be late. I didn’t know what to expect from my meeting with Eric, but I wanted to have all the time in the world.
CHAPTER 19
Half an hour later, we were sitting in a nice intimate restaurant not far from my office. The conversation flowed. We were curious - the natural curiosity of two people who hadn’t seen each other for fifteen years. Although I’m usually very talkative and like to talk about myself, Eric did most of the talking. He’d simply had done more than I had in those fifteen years. While I went on the banal track of military, college, marriage, two children and a cat, Eric had spent five years in frozen Europe and then returned to Israel and moved to Upper Galilee until they gave in and returned to live in the center of the country. Marina had given birth to their first son three weeks before moving to Holland, the second son two years later in Austria, and their last European child was born four months before returning to Israel. Finally, their youngest daughter came into the world in Galilee.
I was always amazed that people made so many changes in their lives: move to Europe, return to Israel, live in the north, return to the center, and all the while to have four children… each of which is a world with an infinite number of changes and adaptations. I was a little jealous of those people who could make so many changes in their life and adapt with ease and tranquility. After all, I needed a month to get ready to go away for a weekend.
Perhaps it was my inflexible nature that made it so hard for me to drop everything and go somewhere that might be better for me.
We finally finished summarizing our lives over the last fifteen years. We finished our meals and waited for our coffee.
"It seems everything’s good for you. You’ve done well in life." Eric tried to dig to a deeper place, and I decided to lower the barriers and masks. I was replete and relaxed and I decided not to let this meeting fade away as a dry, friendly chat.
"Actually, it’s not so good."
"Really?" He sounded surprised.
"Relationships are difficult."
He sighed. "Tell me about it..."
"Can I ask you something?"
"Sure." He leaned closer to me, and I stared at him more closely. He was still the most beautiful man I'd ever seen.
"When do you usually get home from work?" It was evident that he was disappointed by the question. I realized that he wanted a more intimate conversation.
"Late."
"And your wife doesn’t get upset?"
"She’s used to it."
"Really?”
"It seems so. Why do you ask?"
"I’m sick of living alone." The spark in Eric's eyes returned.
"What do you mean?"
"I realize my husband isn’t the only one who works long hours. You also work in high-tech and get home late… But I’m not willing to live alone, and I won’t raise our daughters alone either."
"Doesn’t he help on the weekends?"
"Sure he helps, but a weekend’s only two days. What about the other days of the week?"
Confession of an Abandoned Wife - Box Set (Books 1-3) Page 15
