Cafe Nevo

by Barbara Rogan

  She was not; she did not. Her behavior disappointed him sadly. One day the irate husband of one of his women phoned Vered. Instead of doing the decent thing and blasting the tattletale for impudence, she came to him, carping, complaining, and crying, “Was it true? Was it true?”

  “Yes, it’s true, goddamn it!” he finally exploded. “Did I join a monastery when I married you? Did I become a castrato? You’re a charming girl, Vered, but if you really believe all that crap about a man cleaving only to his wife till the end of his days, et cetera, then I’ve married a fool.” He’d blustered on until the matter of his infidelity was lost among the verbiage, and the only remaining issue was whether or not she would ever regain the esteem she had lost in his eyes, through her scene-making and carrying-on.

  Caspi sighed, remembering her malleability in the good old days. When had she grown so hard? It must have been a gradual process, though for the life of him he could not recall the stages. (There had been that rather unpleasant little contretemps about the birth control pills—but that thought no sooner presented itself to Caspi than he slapped it down.)

  Perhaps, reflected Caspi, it was not entirely Vered’s fault. Perhaps there was some natural force at work here. They seem to have got caught up in some kind of marital whirlpool, sucked into a downward spiral. Struggling only increased the rate of descent; but passivity didn’t help either and was harder to endure. The more women he pursued, the more Vered rejected him; the more she rejected him, the more frequent and public his outside pursuits. She punished his offenses by withdrawing to her studio, where, though forbidden entry, he gravitated whenever he was alone in the flat. He liked to finger her things, read her letters and drafts; he liked to lay her books on their spines and see where they fell open, to find out what she was reading. Vered hated it. She said he violated her privacy, and she stressed the word “violated.”

  “What do you want from me?” she demanded, one stormy afternoon. “What are you trying to find out?”

  “What makes you tick,” he said. “The womanness of you. The female soul.” Thereafter, whenever he pictured his wife in his mind, he saw her eyes looking at him as they did then: dark, remote, judging eyes that for all their criticism really saw him—something Caspi was convinced that no one else did.

  “It’s spying,” she said finally. “I won’t have it.”

  “Fool, you should be flattered I care; instead you accuse me of espionage! I am not spying! It is not information that I seek, but intimacy.”

  “You have an abundance of intimacy,” she’d coldly replied. “Keep out of my room.” She put a lock on the door, but he tore it off.

  On her desk was a portrait of Daniel, taken when he was two. In it the child gazed at the camera with a serious look in his eyes, which were neither blue like Caspi’s nor black like Vered’s. They were a speckled green, and they reminded him of someone he could not put a name to. Mother, father, a sibling perhaps; Caspi remembered none of them.

  He crossed to the bookshelf and read the titles there. They were Hebrew, English, and French in roughly equal measure, organized by genre rather than language: poetry, essays, political memoirs, and a respectable collection of first novels from which his own was conspicuously absent. Indeed none of his books appeared on her shelves, though he had given her handsome leather-bound copies of each. Perhaps, he thought, the titles were not in the best of taste; they had certainly sounded cheap in Sternholz’s mouth. But at the time they had seemed right. And Rami had approved. And they sold.

  They would not sell forever, however, not without new books to bolster them and keep his name in the public eye. Three years had passed since his last book was published, and during that time Vered’s career had blossomed. In addition to her weekly column in Yediot—she was the youngest columnist on the paper by eight years—she now edited the literary section. She, who had been “Caspi’s wife” for the first seven years of their marriage, had achieved a position of power in his world that rivaled his own. If he didn’t start producing soon, he was going to wind up being known as “Caspi’s husband”—a fate worse than death.

  All of which raised certain questions. Caspi had glimpsed something, a pattern, a structure. He lay on the divan with his sneakers on the lilac afghan to consider. If marriage was a microcosm, might it not be governed by the same physical and economic laws as the macrocosm? Conservation of energy, for example: perhaps marriages possessed a finite quantum of energy, or good fortune, that migrated from partner to partner. Was Vered’s success linked casually or causally to his own inactivity? Did her energy level increase as his decreased? Was he, in fact, on a seesaw with Vered?

  A pity if it were so, for though the obvious solution in such a case was to dismount, Caspi could no more disengage himself from her than he could cut off his writing hand. Vered was the only creature on earth who really saw, heard, knew him. Without her he would be thrown back on himself—that is, truly lost.

  Yet Vered, by what Caspi persisted in thinking of as her flirtation, was tampering with the marital ecology, a dangerous tinkering that could lead to cataclysmic upheaval. A lesser man than Caspi might blame himself for the disaster his marriage had become; but Caspi rose above temptation and blamed Vered.

  He blamed her unfeeling heart and her petty obsession with his peccadilloes. She had mastered the art of remote proximity; frequently whole days and nights passed by with no more communication on her part than blank stares when they passed in the hall. For Daniel’s sake she pretended to talk to him when they met over breakfast, but always with a little smile on her face that seemed to say, I don’t really mean this. As soon as Daniel left the room, she fell silent and would not look at him.

  He felt the withdrawal of her eyes more than of her voice. It affected his work and made him feel insubstantial, an invisible man. Oh, she had much to answer for, and wasn’t it terrible (thought Caspi) that a man should most desire the very thing that he could never have? Especially when it was in constant view. Caspi felt like Moses on Mount Nevo, overlooking the forbidden Promised Land. Moses held the lease on the land, and Caspi a license to the woman, but neither of them would ever realize his own property.

  Caspi was only a man, ungraced by God, silenced by a mysterious affliction, unlike Moses, whose stammer was miraculously circumvented. God had grown stingy in his old age, or weak of limb. Had He but seen fit to cure Caspi’s inexplicable silence, releasing that dense cloud of thoughts, images, dreams, phrases, and names which, blocked, exerted such unbearable pressure on his heart, then Caspi could have mimicked His magnanimity by freeing Vered. Free her first, and see what happens, said a voice inside his head; but Caspi was nobody’s fool. Who dared ask that sacrifice of one who had never, in his remembered life, known a mother’s love or a father’s embrace?

  The Jewish Agency had brought him from Europe at the end of the war, clothed by its charity but bereft of identity. First the Agency sent him to a kibbutz, where he lived for three years until the members, with the serene cruelty of idealists, rejected him. They sent him back to the Agency with a satchelful of clean, pressed clothes and a note (written in English so he could not read it, but he took it to an older boy who translated it for him) calling him incorrigible. Then Caspi was sent to an orphanage outside Holon, where he lived out the rest of his short childhood. He was hungry and he was smart; he got the best education he could under the circumstances, read a lot, and won a scholarship to Tel Aviv University. A self-made man who had never loved anyone until he met Vered.

  Moses led his people onward toward the Promised Land, knowing all the while that he himself would never enter, but Caspi had had none of his advantages. If he could not have Vered, no one would.

  Caspi needed a cigarette but found none in Vered’s room. He returned to his study. There, sprawled on his desk like a woman with her legs splayed open, lay his notebook. Caspi threw himself into the chair and seized his pen, holding it poised to stab. His mind coughed, sputtered, and went dead.

  He tried t
o squeeze the words out, like toothpaste from a tube, but nothing emerged. Something inside labored fruitlessly to come forth; he had constipation of the brain, a massive inner blockage that exerted unbearable pressure. Caspi, who by now felt very sorry for himself, thought: if only there were surgery for writers, surgeons who could open up his mind and lift those words out whole. If only one could deliver a book the way Athena was delivered, by cranial Cesarean.

  Then the telephone rang, and Caspi jumped, banging his knee on the desk.

  “Oh, it’s you,” he growled. “No, it’s all right. I’ve been meaning to call. I’m having second thoughts about the anthology.”

  Rami Dotan squealed over the wire. With an expression of distaste Caspi moved the receiver further from his ear.

  “Shut up,” he said. “Don’t get hysterical. I haven’t made up my mind definitely yet.”

  “We can’t cancel it now,” Rami cried. “We’ve already announced it.”

  “So worse comes to worst you’ll unannounce it.”

  “Why are you doing this to me?”

  “I’m not doing it to you, dear boy,” said Caspi. “I’m doing it for you. I just don’t believe that friend Khalil is going to turn out a creditable performance. We don’t want to humiliate the cousins, do we?”

  “Aha!” said Rami.

  “What does ‘Aha’ mean?”

  “I see!”

  “What do you see, you moron?”

  “I can’t let you do it, Caspi.”

  “Do what?” he roared.

  “Make such a tactical error. If you pull out now, you’d just be confirming the rumors.”

  Caspi took the receiver from his ear and held it away, looking at it. Dotan’s high-pitched voice vibrated in the air. After some time Caspi hung up, but continued staring at the phone.

  It rang a moment later. He picked it up and said fervently, “You asshole.”

  “The feeling is mutual, though I deplore your choice of expression. How did you know it was me?”

  “I didn’t, Jemima,” he said wearily. “I’m sorry, that wasn’t intended for you. What do you want?”

  “Vered, please.”

  “Is something wrong with Daniel?”

  “No, he’s fine. He’s sleeping. Where’s Vered?”

  “Sitting at my feet, gazing up adoringly. She says to tell you she can’t talk now.”

  “What a charming sense of humor you have,” Jemima said. “Put her on.”

  “She’s out,” he said curtly.

  “Where?”

  Caspi put his hand to his throat, where a tight bubble threatened to burst. He said, “Am I my wife’s keeper?”

  “You have Arab eyes,” he crooned, caressing her face. “Pitch-black wells, deep as sorrow.”

  “I forgot you were a poet,” Vered said.

  “I never forget you are a critic. Shall I expect a review of my performance in tomorrow’s Yediot?”

  She giggled. “Not bloody likely.”

  His eyes grew solemn. “No, you are right. In this room we are only man and woman. We leave our other differences outside that door.”

  “That’s very romantic,” she said, a trifle drily; Khalil gave her a sharp look.

  “Don’t you want to be here with me?” He touched her breast, and she felt his heat through the sheet. Her nipple stiffened, brushing his palm, and he caught his breath.

  She said after a pause, “I came to you.”

  “You did.” His hand slid under the sheet and down her body. Vered’s breath turned quick and shallow. She closed her eyes.

  Sometime later, he paused on the verge of entry, to tease. “Say you want it, Mrs. Caspi,” he demanded.

  “Don’t play games!”

  “It’s no game. Say you want it.”

  “God help me, I want it.”

  “Allah Akhbar!” he cried, and thrust home.

  But once again he finished quickly and withdrew at once, leaving Vered with no more recourse than a dinner guest whose meal has been inadequate, unequal to her hunger. Khalil kissed her perfunctorily, then sat up and lit two cigarettes. He gave her one.

  “Tell me,” he murmured, rubbing her shoulder, “is he impotent with you?”

  She gasped and pulled the sheet higher.

  “I’ve met a few of his women since we started working together. Isn’t it strange that none of them comes close to you, neither in looks nor sensuality?” She looked at him in amazement. “There must be a reason.”

  “What business is it of yours?”

  Khalil showed his teeth. “Anything that concerns you, my love, concerns me.”

  “How very odd that you should think so, on such short acquaintance.”

  His grin faltered, then broadened. He bowed his head. “More and more I see that Caspi is a fool. But so, perhaps, are you. I wonder at your loyalty to such a husband.”

  “Is this loyalty?” She waved her hand around the room, which was hot and sultry despite the open window. Neon flashes from across the street provided sporadic illumination, and the smell of fish wafted in on the breeze. It was a transients’ hotel on the Jaffa waterfront, one step above a brothel; one of the few places, he’d explained to her, that a Jewish and Arab couple could take a room together unharassed.

  “But you are so reticent,” Khalil said. “Don’t you trust me?”

  Vered looked at him. Stripped of his designer jeans, his corduroy jacket with the professorial patches at the elbows, and his Gucci shoes, clad only in the dusky skin of his race, he seemed more a stranger than ever. His smooth brown body was almost hairless, unlike the hirsute Caspi, whose chest and stomach were so thickly matted with silky brown hair that the skin underneath stayed white even in summer.

  She had heard, and her limited sampling tended to confirm, that hairy men make better lovers. Caspi in bed was so different from Caspi out of bed as to suggest a split personality. Out of bed he was cocky, egotistic, and insensitive; in bed he seemed possessed of a genuine desire to please and an uncanny awareness of his partner’s feelings. Hence his success with women, including, for too many years, Vered. She could not hate him in bed, so she stopped sleeping with him. Vered had not lain with a man in so long that her body felt dead.

  Because no one touched her, except Daniel. Jemima was not a tactile person. Caspi was, but she despised him. She remained a woman only to her son, whose nurturing was the only womanly function she performed. Outside the house, competing in a man’s world, she was careful to strip both her work and her relationships of anything that might be construed as femininity, discarding empathy, sympathy, tenderness, and even grace, choosing to display only the bare bone of intellect. Pain especially had to be kept hidden, for while certain vigorous modes of suffering—Caspi’s vaunted inner torment was one example—were permissibly male in character, she was not capable of such raucous displays; her anguish was at once too quiet and too deep for expression.

  Pity was the other danger. Because Caspi’s much publicized philandering left her particularly vulnerable to pity, she could accept none, but invested tremendous energy in creating a persona that repelled, if not the emotion, then at least its expression.

  Vered took pride and comfort in her ability to deceive. Even after the most bitter of quarrels, which left Caspi prostrated in his study or sodden in Nevo, she went about her business as usual, with the utmost composure.

  So much effort left her drained. She felt empty, desiccated; hardly a woman at all. And because she felt sexless, she was treated that way; if any of the men she worked with had amorous impulses, they kept them strictly to themselves. Until Khalil.

  When the Arab turned his dark eyes on her and let them travel down her body before raising them to her face, there wordlessly but openly to proclaim his desire, she was, all unwilling, jolted to the core. Her heart pounded, and her mouth went dry, and a pilot light rekindled in her belly. When their hands touched, his told secrets and asked questions to which hers replied.

  But trust him? Trust a stranger
? Trust (she was ashamed, but could not help thinking) an Arab? “No,” she said.

  “Wise woman!” Khalil laughed, not only undaunted but delighted by her reply. “But seriously, what is his problem? Why isn’t he writing?”

  Vered hesitated. “He’s not as good as he needs to be to write the kind of book he wants to write. He says he can’t get it right.”

  An odd look crossed Khalil’s face, of recognition, almost of sympathy, but he said scornfully, “Is that why he tumbles everything in skirts?”

  “No. That’s been going on much longer than his writer’s block.”

  “Then why does he do it, with a woman like you at home?”

  She shrugged. “It’s his problem, not mine. I’m not my husband’s keeper.”

  “Ah! And you don’t mind his screwing around. It doesn’t bother you at all.”

  “Does your wife mind?” she countered.

  His face darkened; he did not like her mentioning his wife. “She doesn’t know. Discretion is not only the better part of valor but also one form of respect I feel I owe my wife. Caspi, on the other hand, flaunts his tarts all over town.”

  Vered said, “He’s a bastard all right,” and shuddered deep within her body. She had undressed before this stranger, exposed her breasts, opened her legs: but only now, discussing Caspi with him, did she experience at last the sensual thrill of betrayal.

  “He’s right about one thing,” Khalil said.

  “What’s that?”

  “He’s not a good enough writer. I’ve been reading his stuff.”

  She moved away. “Why?”

  “For the introduction I’m writing. Didn’t he tell you? I’m writing an introduction to Caspi’s section of the anthology, and he’s writing one to mine.”