by Beth Miller
‘You’ve never defended Alex before!’ I wriggled out of her arms and moved back to my end of the sofa. ‘You’re my friend! You should be on my side.’
‘You know me, Aliza – I only call it how I see it. To me, it looks like you had a try at life outside, then ran back when it got hard, and thought you’d have another crack at Nathan.’
‘My god, Deborah, that is a terrible thing to say.’ I could feel the traitorous red spread across my cheeks yet again.
‘Sorry, hon, you can tell me it wasn’t like that if you want.’ Deborah shrugged.
‘How is it,’ I said, my voice trembling, ‘that you find it so easy to have a confrontation with me and yet you can’t even say boo to a goose at your mother-in-law?’
‘Mother-in-laws are a special case.’ Deb had the chutzpah to laugh. ‘And you’re crying out for a confrontation, Crazy Kid.’
‘I didn’t want to try again with Nathan.’ I stared at my knees, willing my face to cool down. I would never tell Deb, or anyone, ever, the truth about my disastrous night with Nathan.
‘I believe you hon; thousands wouldn’t. Thousands won’t.’ She went on, undeterred: ‘But you know, there was no reason you couldn’t have split your time between your family and your husband. It’s called “compromise”, Aliza, it’s what couples do. I know your mum does all the compromising in your family, but your parents are old-fashioned. Modern couples both have to do it. Michael would get mad, rightly so, if I spent as much time as I wanted with my sisters, so I see them when he’s out, or at work. I don’t suddenly say, Oh, by the way, I’ll be staying with Pearl four nights this week.’
‘It wasn’t only that, though.’ The unfairness of Deborah’s accusations made me want to cry. I needed her to understand that it wasn’t my fault. ‘There were too many cultural differences. I didn’t fit into his world.’ Echoing words Nathan had said last night, I added, ‘Mixed marriages never work out.’
‘Didn’t exactly give it a lot of time, though, did you?’
‘Deb, I thought you were supposed to be cheering me up.’
‘Sorry, hon.’ Deb shifted back along the sofa so we were feet-to-feet again. I think she could see that I’d had enough. ‘Let me think of something uplifting. Oh yes, I know. You can help me with the catering for Ez’s bar mitzvah this weekend.’
‘How is that uplifting?’ I forced myself to engage with this new topic. ‘And why are you involved with the catering? They’ve hired some fancy-shmancy company.’
‘Oh, but she’s asked me to supervise the waitresses. She doesn’t trust them, apparently, because the company she always uses got a few new staff. She squeezed a discount out of them, but you know, there’s no reassuring her.’
She was Esther, Michael’s intimidating older sister. She was married to my brother Uri, which meant that Ezra, the bar mitzvah boy, was both my and Deb’s nephew. Even I found the family connections confusing. Deb and I were some vague variant of sisters-in-law, a couple of times removed. We’d known Esther all our lives; her family lived at the other end of Springfield Street. She terrified us when we were kids.
‘Why did she ask you to help?’
‘Story of my life. Until I have kids, I’ll be the one roped into all these things. “You’ve got time on your hands, Deborah,”’ she whined, imitating Esther’s nasal voice.
‘Why didn’t she ask me, then?’ Seeing Deb open her mouth to tell me exactly why, I waved her down. ‘No, it’s all right, I know, I’m the meshuggener who ran away. She’ll probably put me at a table in the kitchen.’
‘Aw, hon,’ Deb said, softening. ‘Look on the bright side. Now you’ve returned to the fold, everyone’s got such low expectations of you. Rock-bottom low. You were the golden girl, and now you’ve chucked that away. All you have to do is manage not to kill anyone, and they’ll all think you’re doing brilliantly.’
Sexy Things to Try
Drunk sex.
Play strip poker (or Scrabble, or whatever game you like – whatever game you’re not very good at, Eliza!).
Go out together, with you not wearing any underwear.
Sex in the shower.
Sex standing up.
Watch porn together (only mild, I promise).
Oral sex – Alex to Eliza.
Oral sex – Eliza to Alex.
Sex outdoors (in Brockwell Park?).
Make love during Eliza’s period (sorry, ‘bleeding’).
Some light S&M (I will explain this when we get to it).
Thirty
January 2001
Here’s what I didn’t tell Deborah.
Yesterday morning.
As usual, I was in the annex, getting Nathan’s breakfast things together. And as usual, he was watching me and saying very little. I’d got used to his steady gaze over the past few weeks. I quite liked it. All right, Deb-in-my-head, I liked it a lot. But when he cleared his throat and asked me out to dinner, I was startled. I think he was too. His eyes were wide, as if he couldn’t quite believe that he had said it out loud. It was a baffling request, whichever way you looked at it. Going out to dinner was not something unmarried people did, especially not ones with our history. But even as I was working out a polite way to say no, by invoking impropriety and my parents’ disapproval, I knew I would say yes. We had both already travelled so far outside impropriety that he would know it was a nonsense. As for my parents’ disapproval, I didn’t exactly have a track record of caring about that. And the truth is, the memory of his lips on mine still sent a warmth across my body every time I thought about it.
My silence seemed to rattle him, and he said in a rush, ‘No big deal. Just to thank you for all you’ve done since you moved back home. The breakfasts, and the cleaning. And everything.’
‘There’s no need, Nathan.’
‘I want to.’ His surprised eyes held mine, and I blinked more heavily than usual and looked away.
‘That would be lovely,’ I said, knowing that I was allowing an already-ambiguous situation to become even more uncertain.
Last night.
We met at the restaurant at seven o’clock. It goes without saying that we couldn’t leave together from my parents’ house. As Deb guessed, I told Mum I was going to her place.
It also goes without saying that we couldn’t eat anywhere local where people might know us. Nathan chose a kosher place on the other side of North London which wasn’t easy to find. I was slightly late, and he was waiting for me outside the restaurant.
‘Aliza!’ he said, and we stood there, me slightly breathless and him slightly awkward. ‘I thought you might not come.’
‘Will they think we are married?’ I asked. I was still wearing my Accessorise engagement ring and the silver wedding band.
‘I don’t care what they think,’ Nathan said, and pushed the door open.
We were greeted by an unsmiling waiter, who I felt was judging us, though he knew nothing about us. Nathan chose a table in the middle of the room, rather than a more obviously nice one in the window. Despite his bluster, I guess he was worried that we might be seen. I felt absurd and shy, and studied the menu. It wasn’t as comforting as I’d thought it might be, even though it was a list of food in which everything was familiar. I pushed away the thought of Alex sitting in various restaurants opposite me, the same position where Nathan sat now, smiling, offering vegetarian alternatives to the things we had come to try, soothing my many anxieties.
I began to worry about what Nathan and I would talk about, and after we’d ordered, there was an awkward silence. Then the waiter brought a bottle of wine that I hadn’t heard Nathan request, and we both quickly drank a glass, as if by agreement. Things were easier after that, and easier still after a second bottle that, like its predecessor, seemed to turn up unannounced. I remember us both laughing at the huge pile of red napkins the waiter brought, as if we couldn’t be trusted to eat tidily. We managed to talk about our families, and the things we had done since our abortive engagement, without either of us
becoming upset or angry. To start with, I kept apologising, and Nathan kept asking me not to, but after a while it did genuinely feel as if we had moved forward into a place of forgiveness. He even said that he found my rebellious streak exciting.
‘Is that why you said yes, after we first met?’ I asked him. It felt like a perfectly natural question to ask, right now, even though part of my mind was aware that at any other point I’d have died rather than talk about our courtship. But he seemed not to mind, and responded:
‘Ah, I didn’t know you were rebellious then. I only knew you’d turned down a few others, but I thought that was because they were unsuitable.’
‘They were!’
He waved his wine glass at me. ‘You were my twelfth introduction, and I have to admit, my expectations were low. I vaguely remembered seeing you when we were children at some family thing, I was about fifteen and you were maybe ten.’
‘I don’t remember that at all.’
‘You were just a little kid. But now, I walked into your parents’ stuffy living room, and I saw a beautiful woman.’
‘My mother is holding up very well,’ I said, to deflect my embarrassment.
Rightly, he ignored my joke. ‘The light from a table lamp fell across your face, and you were… well, you were glowing. There was something about you that touched my heart.’
‘Oh, Nathan.’
‘I knew that finally, it was time to say yes.’
‘Nathan, I’m so sorry I wrecked all that for you. That’s beautiful.’
‘You’re beautiful, Aliza. More beautiful even than when I first saw you.’
I didn’t know what to say, so I did this stupid fanning thing with my hand in front of my face, I have no idea why but I’d seen Vicky do it when she was pretending to cry.
‘And you said yes to me,’ he said. ‘You have no idea what that meant to me. Why did you?’
The reason at the time, of course, was that he had been the best of a bad bunch. But the man sitting opposite me was a good man, a kind man, and he deserved better than that.
‘There was something about you, too. I liked the way your hair curled on your collar.’
He laughed, and touched his hair. ‘I had better let it grow a bit longer, in that case.’
The conversation moved on, and I found myself talking about Alex, about our missteps and difficulties, and how he had walked out on me. Nathan listened carefully, smiling and nodding. He looked more relaxed than I had ever seen him.
‘It’s so difficult,’ he said, dabbing his mouth with a napkin, ‘to be with someone from a different culture. Mixed marriages never work out.’
‘Don’t they?’ Maybe he was right. Mine hadn’t, after all.
‘You can’t go back.’ He signalled to the waiter.
‘What do you mean?’ I tried to process his words in my head, but found it impossible.
‘I mean one can’t go back. Not just you. Once one’s done something irreversible, there’s no going back.’
I glanced at my watch, and was astonished to see that it was past eleven o’clock. Where had the time gone?
‘I came back, though,’ I said.
‘You never really left, though, did you,’ he said, smiling. He glanced at the bill, and put down a pile of notes.
‘Halvesies,’ I said, but he shook his head. Then he smoothed out two red napkins and handed one to me. ‘Let’s keep one of these each. A reminder of a wonderful evening.’
I put the napkin in my bag. ‘Thank you for a lovely dinner.’
‘No, thank you. Thank you for your extreme honesty and openness tonight.’
Had I been so honest and open? I wasn’t too sure, now, what I had said. Had I revealed too much? I stood up to go to the ladies, and was shocked at how drunk I was. I couldn’t walk in a straight line to the bathroom, and my face seemed blurry in the mirror. I nearly tripped over when I came out of the cubicle. I was giggling about this when I got back to Nathan, and he firmly steered me to the door and into a black cab that was waiting. I practically fell into the back seat and he sat very close to me, and as the taxi moved away, he pulled me close and kissed me, long and hard on the mouth.
It was one thing to kiss him. It was quite another to sleep with him. Being drunk, feeling reckless, worldly, tainted: these were terrible reasons to do something.
And yet here we were, lying side by side in Zaida’s bed, facing each other. I knew I was more experienced than him, and that the things I knew would make him blush. He looked absolutely petrified. I stroked my fingers up the length of his penis, and he moaned in horrified pleasure. It was slightly longer than Alex’s, but thinner, and in its circumcised state it looked vulnerable. I felt sorry for it.
I knew I had to get it over with and climbed on top of him; he lay under me, pale and unsure. Whatever had happened in the cab, I now felt no desire at all. I guided him into me with my hands, and moved up and down against him in what felt like a horrible parody of the times I had made love with Alex. I didn’t even think about condoms, but let him come into me with a shout that would have wakened the dead. As I rolled off, knowing I wouldn’t come – that was something I would only ever allow myself to do with Alex – I caught a glimpse of the disgust on Nathan’s face. I knew that to him – and to myself – I would always be damaged goods.
I woke, heart thudding, mouth dry as the Sahara, glad to emerge from a confused, frightening dream full of nameless chasing creatures. I stared at my watch until my eyes adjusted to the dark enough to allow me to read it: 4.45 a.m.
Carefully, desperate not to disturb him, I untangled myself from the sheets and slid out of bed. I pulled on my shirt, the only item of clothing I could find, and tiptoed into the kitchen, closing the door behind me. I stood at the sink and drank my weight in water. I didn’t turn on the light. The darkness was friendly. I didn’t want to look myself in the eye. What wouldn’t I give for the ability to not think about anything at all? To have a perfectly blank mind? Alex told me about meditating, about emptying your mind, but it was just another of the many things on his lists that I hadn’t got round to. I sat at the table, the ants crawling frantically through my brain. If only the Brixton flat was still empty, I could go now, could get a night bus. But Alex was back there. I had no place to go other than back to my parents’ house, but I couldn’t creep in there now. I’d been meant to be out at Deb’s, but should have been back home and in bed hours ago. If I went in, and anyone woke up… I shivered at the thought. No, I’d have to stay here till I heard him stir – he usually got up around seven – hide in the bathroom till he’d gone, then grab my things and go into the house then. Pretend I’d been preparing his breakfast as usual.
But moments later the bedroom door opened.
‘Sorry I woke you,’ I said, turning. I could see only his outline. ‘I tried to be quiet.’
He snapped on the overhead light, and I covered my eyes with my hand.
‘I wasn’t sleeping too well,’ he said. ‘Too much wine.’ He sat next to me, gently drew my hand away from my face. ‘Aliza, look at me.’
‘It’s too bright.’
‘Aliza, I think we should get married.’
‘I’m already married!’
‘Not properly. Not in the eyes of Ha-Shem.’
I covered my eyes again.
‘I know what people are like, out there,’ Nathan said. I peeped through my fingers at him, watched him waving his arm, dismissing the secular world in a ‘they’re all the same’ gesture, the way I might once have done. ‘They get divorced all the time.’
‘They don’t, not really.’
‘You hear about it. Married for a few months, then get divorced.’
‘That’s famous people, actors and musicians. Not real people.’
Nathan put his hand on my arm. Though he had, just a few hours ago, put his hands on far more intimate places, I still jumped in shock.
‘You’ve got a second chance, Aliza,’ he whispered, ‘and so have I.’
I st
ared at him, my thoughts careering wildly, the ants out of control on a rollercoaster. Up they went – I can’t marry Nathan! And down they came – maybe I can! How much easier everything would be, if I could. Second chance! Maybe the whole Alex thing was just a dream! Up again – but it was a lovely dream… Down – but I’ve woken up now… up and down it went.
I don’t know how long I stared at Nathan, but it was too long, because he said, ‘It’s disconcerting when you don’t say anything, Aliza.’
It felt unbearable to hurt him again, but I knew what the answer was the moment he said, ‘I think we should get married.’ I knew from the moment he kissed me.
Two nights ago, I had read the next list in the Re-education book. It was ‘Poetry’ – Alex’s favourite poems. He’d even written out some verses in his tiniest writing, so it all still fit on one side.
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken.
By the time I’d reached the end of the page, my face was wet with tears.
You can’t help who you love.
‘Nathan,’ I said. I couldn’t bear to see the hope that was written across his face. ‘I really want to thank you for your kind offer…’
‘It wasn’t meant kindly, Aliza.’ His expression darkened.
‘I know, but it is unbelievably kind of you to give me another chance,’ and in a rush, my stomach weighed with guilt, ‘I’m so sorry but I’m going to have to say no.’
‘But…’ he looked as if I had whipped the floor out from under him, ‘you came back.’
‘What do you mean?’
He spread his arms wide. ‘You ran off, you married out, we thought that was that. When you came back, I assumed… Jesus.’ He put his head in his hands.
