by Dana Arama
"I’m happy that this arrangement suits you. After all, you should feel at home here." I smiled with relief. Although I didn’t hire Guy to be my friend, I preferred to work in a pleasant atmosphere.
"It's a lot more than what I left." He let his guard down for a moment before putting his professional expression back on. "Let's go check out our work environment."
"I think the most comfortable place would be there," I said, pointing to the large building outside. Next to it, on the other side of the path, stood another building, smaller and painted the same colors as the house. This building was the studio. I had not entered it in three years.
I opened the big glass doors and went out onto the patio. The summer heat, combined with the high humidity, made it difficult to breathe. I felt I was inhaling water.
"Are you sure you don’t mind working outside?"
He was sensitive enough to pick up that I had difficulty breathing. "No, not outside. Come and see."
I typed in the code and the door opened. A wave of moisture greeted us. Guy took off his sunglasses and wiped away the condensation that covered them. Outside, the building looked modest, perhaps even boring, but the interior had been designed precisely for Dan and Robbie’s needs: the pool (which I had refilled yesterday) was built according to Dan’s design, the gym equipment was ordered as Robbie had requested. The three exercise bicycles were my suggestion.
"This is great." He looked around and added, "We've got almost everything we need. I see you were a sporty family.”
We were, I said pointed out to myself.
"Anything else we need?" I asked. I was upset enough just by entering this place. The fact that he used the past tense cut me like a knife. This hall’s potential had remained unrealized even before my husband and son had disappeared from my life. Maybe now, in my twisted way, I'd change that.
"Mattresses. We'll have to move some of the equipment in order to make room for a thick mattress pad. We can’t train for combat without a proper surface to fall on."
"No problem. I’ll buy whatever we need." I glanced at my watch. It was already one in the afternoon. "I don’t think we’ll get one today. It’s Friday. They probably close early."
"It's not that urgent. After all, I gotta get you into shape first. I’ve done some research. It’s best to start with water training because -" He hesitated. I found it odd that he was avoiding eye contact. Could he be ashamed of what he wanted to say?
"Because…?" I insisted. "I expect to get all the information."
"Okay, it's because of your age. I can’t train you like I’d train a young man of eighteen who joins a combat unit, like they trained me. To prevent injuries, you must start slowly and carefully. Flex the joints, strengthen the muscles and then start with hand to hand combat.”
There was no better way to remind me that we were there for work. I gave him a reassuring smile, despite the fact that this reminder shook my femininity to its core. Who knew how many youthful years I had parted with during the past three years?
"I'm glad you’re so responsible." Deep down, I knew I would not be satisfied to merely ‘come back to life’. I longed to feel as I once had - full of passion, full of life. I longed to touch them once more. I feared I would never feel that way again. I felt a lump of tears jam in my now dry throat.
Our sports room had concrete walls on one side. On the other side, facing the garden, were sliding glass walls. When the glass walls were opened, the roof above would roll back and reveal the vast skies. The pool was located right in the center.
"Let me show you around." I went to the fuse box and opened it. "This will open part of the roof and windows, so the pool remains only half covered in the summer." I glanced at him. I had not yet learned to read him, but he looked like a happy child. He reminded me of how Robbie looked while I sat with him during the drafting of the studio plans. "Mommy... you did great!” he had said back then, hugging my shoulders.
Encouraged by Guy’s expression, I continued with my tour. "The TV’s turned on from here, and, of course, the air conditioner. As you’ve already discovered, that’s crucial when the place is closed." I was too ashamed to say that this room had never been used. Dan never reached a suitable state of relaxation to resume swimming, and the murmur that was revealed in Robbie’s heart made him concentrate on horseback riding.
"Not bad at all. This is really well designed. And I've seen some highly professional sports facilities."
I took one last look around the place before we left. I imagined the pool parties Robbie talked about, the young girls in minimal bathing suits, the youthful men, the unrealized dreams.
We closed the place up and returned to the chill of the air conditioner. I had no more TVs, pools or other devices to hide behind. I felt exposed. "Do you want a cold drink?" Again, I wanted to hide my face, this time behind a tall drink, preferably saturated with alcohol.
"Is it okay if I take a beer from the fridge? You want one as well?"
"Great." I was not the beer type, but white wine didn’t fit the moment and an iced cocktail at noon would have caused me to reveal my thoughts completely.
We sat on either side of the counter and he pulled out two bottles from the bottom shelf of the refrigerator. I wasn’t surprised he remembered where the tall glasses were kept. I watched him as he moved gracefully in front of me. Like Sergey, he was agile, despite his bulky body.
I knew it was an introduction to a conversation that, on the one hand, I did not want to have. On the other hand, I wanted it to be over. The tension weighed on me and caused me a sense of confusion. In any case, I was not sure what I wanted. I glanced at my watch and realized that within two hours, I was already regretting the decisions I made two weeks ago. Maybe I was not ready to open my life completely and let in this stranger who had come into my kitchen and made himself at home. I decided that in this upcoming conversation, I would only confirm information I knew he could read online. I was not ready to trust him more than necessary, and certainly not to share my plans with him.
The beer was sweating on the counter. If it had a heart, it must have been beating fast, like mine.
"I wanted to talk to you about something." He sat on the seat in front of me and took a long sip of his drink.
Here it comes, I thought. "What about?"
"The weekends. We haven’t talked about them yet."
I resumed breathing, worrying that the green tint of my face had become evident. "There’s no problem at all. What do you want to do on the weekends? You can, of course, sleep here. It’s your home now."
"Are you sure you don’t have a problem being alone?"
There was something in his quietness that reassured me. Maybe it was because he refrained from asking what we both knew he really wanted to know. At that moment, I knew I had chosen well. He was intelligent and sensitive enough not to pry into my life.
"I'm a big girl." I softened my rebellious words with a smile. "I don’t need a babysitter anymore."
"Great. I'll be at dinner with my parents in the moshav. You can call me any time if there's a problem.”
"There won’t be a problem. Aren’t you going to go out with your girlfriend?” If I had read him right, I knew he would not be happy to share his feelings. He did not seem like the chatty type. I preferred to corner him with my questions than become the focus for his.
"She flew abroad and left me with the ultimatum.”
In his voice there was a note of distress, which he hid well by presenting a resigned attitude. Perhaps I was wrong and, in fact, he wanted to talk. He must have seen me as an adult, or a stranger. Sometimes, opening up to strangers is easier. “The ultimatum was either get married, or break up?"
He nodded. “Marriage just doesn’t fit my plans for the near future." From his expression, I got the impression that he had no intention of elaborating on his plans. "Allow me to ask: how long have you been dating?" I tasted the beer and let it slide down my throat. The bitterness was not to my liking and I consider
ed converting to a glass of wine, but I knew that he would soon leave and I would feel more comfortable.
"On and off - five or six years; it sounds a lot more than it was in reality,” he replied.
"What was the reality?”
"The reality was complicated. Most of the time, we weren’t a couple at all.”
"How did you meet?" He had begun to intrigue me. Maybe it felt good for me to concentrate on someone else's life, and maybe he completed what I was missing from Robbie’s: the indecision of the twenties, dilemmas, unresolved dreams.
"I was wounded on one of my missions. I was able to retire from the army, because I’d finished my national service, but there, in the unit, you don’t leave just like that, so after I recovered, I went back to the base and I commanded a team, rather than being a full-fledged warrior again. Hadas's twin brother, Yoni, was on my team. At our discharge ceremony, when the families came, I saw her for the first time. And the second time was just a few months later. Yoni was killed in action in Gaza and I went to visit at the shivah.”
I saw no trace of self-pity in his features. A serious injury, the loss of a friend – he had endured real problems without showing weakness. But now I realized that it nurtured his sensitivity. Death bit into his life, as it did mine. "And you never broke up?" I asked, inadvertently softening my voice.
"We did break up." He shook the last drops in the bottle into his mouth and got up to fetch a fresh one from the refrigerator. "I started studying, I stopped studying. I went abroad, I returned. In between, we were together, we broke up, we got back together. I never promised her anything that I didn’t keep.”
"That’s decent of you, without a doubt." I pushed away the almost full bottle of beer and went to make some iced coffee. "But sometimes, your behavior also sends a message. You kept her on the back burner, one way or another.” I returned to my seat with my cup and sat down opposite him. His expression did not reveal if he was aware of this or not.
"Do you love her?" The edge of a smile was on my lips. I wondered if we would have come to this sense of openness if not for the influence of two bottles of beer.
"She's fine. She's really great and savvy. It's me. I’m not fit now for all this mess that comes with a marriage."
Guy said no word about being in love with Hadas. "Twenty-eight’s still very young, even though I know quite a few who got married at that age."
He hesitated a moment. "This isn’t the problem.”
Now is the time to address the issue of the 'plans for the future’ he mentioned before, but chose to gloss over, I thought. Though, I did not want to pressure him. It was enough that we were not talking about me. "You said you started to learn and you stopped. Why did you stop?"
He gave me a half-smile which suggested that he was proud of what he was about to tell, a contradiction to what you'd expect from those who abandoned something in the middle. The muffled sound of the mother in me asked me how I would react if Robbie informed me that he wanted to drop out in the middle of the school year. But the second voice, the one I put on in front of strangers, whose job was to remind me of the new circumstances, whispered to me that Robbie won’t be able to make decisions any more, let alone tell me about them.
"I had to prove to my parents I still had strength in me. Since I started getting regular disability payments, I’d been giving the money for the benefit of the Moshav farm. For me, it was like I was contributing without having to actually be there. One day we had a debate about it. They said to me that this pension meant I wasn’t as capable as I once was, and I needed to save the money I got and come work on the farm. They said they’d give me the easy jobs. So I left everything: my studies, my home, my country. And I went to make big money. Prove that I still can"
"So? Did you succeed in proving your claim?"
“I went to Alaska and worked as a crab fisherman. I worked there for two years. I earned enough to shut everyone’s mouth.”
"Alaska. Brrr… cold. Not a very friendly place, I’d imagine." And isolated enough to not be exposed to Israeli news, I realized. That is probably why he did not recognize me.
"Unfriendly is an understatement. When I got there, the first thing I saw was the mountains. They were still covered with snow and looked stunning. Really breathtaking - and I tell you that as someone who mountains don’t really appeal to. When I arrived in town, right at the entrance, I saw a monument. It’s not the sort of thing we’re used to. It was a monument to the fishermen who died at sea. A lot of fishermen had died very cruel deaths… ships that left and didn’t return, ships coming back with sailors washed overboard. Even that didn’t deter me. If I’d survived one of the toughest courses in the world, I wasn’t going to be put off.”
"The Bering and the Mediterranean are two completely different worlds," I remarked. There was no need to excel in geography to know the difference between the icy, northern coasts and our pristine beaches.
He again ran his large, rough hand over his stubble. His eyes were fixed somewhere in the vastness of the Bering Sea, on fragments of memory that were not so far away. "You're right. None of what I went through in the Mediterranean prepared me for life on deck in the Bering. Swimming in the Med at three in the morning, mid-February, it's cold, but it's hot compared to the Bering. The cold was out of this world. No matter how many layers I wrapped myself in, the cold still seeped through and froze the sweat on my body, turned my fingers stiff, and burned my skin. The temperatures turned the waves into dangerous stacks of ice and the deck into an ice rink. Add to that the thirty-five or forty meter waves… not a welcomed environment to anyone who is not addicted to the sea.”
He’s adventurous and brave, I thought. Not necessarily in that order. "This love for the sea, did it begin during your military service or before?"
"Much earlier. The first thing I did when I got my driver's license was go to sea. Without my love for the sea, I couldn’t have served where I did. There were all kinds of guys who tried, but the sea doesn’t give discounts, and those who love the ocean accept the full price it charges.” He sat up straight in his chair and picked up his beer. His body language turned guarded, putting up a wall that stopped the conversation.
I stopped everything. Was his openness a ploy to get me to open up to him, or did he just need to talk? I did not bother to find out. "All right. We’ve settled everything and you have all the codes you need, so I'll go and relax with the Friday newspapers."
He glanced at his watch. It was only early evening, long before my usual bedtime. "Wait a minute. I wanted to ask you something.”
"Save it for Sunday," I quickly interrupted, "or tomorrow." I was moving away by now and had already picked up the paper, as if I always read it. In fact, I had ignored it for years.
I lay in my bed with the air-conditioning blasting and the shutters closed, but I could not relax myself into the calm of a Friday evening. In my mind were images of Guy moving around my house, violating my privacy. I listened for any sound. I think I heard the door to the office open. I sat up and immediately got out of bed. I grabbed my robe from the chair and threw it around myself carelessly. In my mind, I scanned the last things I did in the office. Did I put the files back in the safe? Now I was sure that I had forgotten to close and lock it. I opened my door quietly and looked out into the hall. No sign of him. Barefoot, I rushed into the office. It was empty. I leaned towards the safe. I glanced over my shoulder and when I did not see anyone, I opened it. All the files were still in place.
I went to the stairs. I got to the point where I could see the door of the suite. It was open halfway. I saw him walking around his room.
"Hey, man." His deep voice startled me as I tiptoed away up the staircase. After a moment, I turned. He was talking on his cell phone, and I wanted to know with whom and about what.
"Can we meet up today?"
I went back down another step.
"I need your help. I think I'm getting into trouble."
He went into the back room and I cou
ld not hear the rest of his words. I stood in the same spot, the last step. If I descended more, I would be completely exposed. Now I could see his upper body. He was naked. He had wide shoulders, a thick neck, and sparse hair on the center of his head.
"There’s a secret here..." His voice dropped, and I heard nothing else, just murmurs. I waited until he’d left his room. He was dressed in a dark bathing suit, and as he walked toward the pool, he continued to talk on the phone.
I raced up the stairs and peered out of the window at the side of the room. He ended the call, punched in the code for the side door, and entered. A moment later, I saw the glass walls and ceiling slowly opening uncovering the heart of the hall. He jumped into the pool. There was something reassuring in the rhythm of his swimming movements. I counted fifty-five laps before I closed the shutters and went to bed.
At that point, I did not know this sight would become an integral part of my nights.
When I went downstairs, darkness had fallen. He was not there - he had gone to his parents’ while I dozed. I could no longer ignore the nothingness, the void that had been my situation of choice so far. Now, after my house again knew sounds of life, the void filled it like a gray fog. I heated some of Esther’s food, allowed myself a glass of wine, and sat on the patio. It was ten-fifteen. I would have expected him back by now. I filled my glass again. A minute later, I decided that, in fact, it would be better if he did not find me there when I returned. I put the plate in the empty sink and took the half-full glass to my room.
