Look for Me (6 page)

At other times he spoke just as mournfully and hopelessly about Miriam. He worried that she was neglecting their children; he didn’t trust her new boyfriend. A self-centered pig, he said, who was drawing Miriam away from the children, and she was too blind to grasp what was going on. What she saw in that poor excuse for a human being, that petty crook who was born with his brain in his arse and his nose in other people’s arses, he would never know. Benny was a devoted father, and sometimes when I walked along the seashore with my jeans rolled up to my knees I’d see him sitting Buddha-style on a blanket, surrounded by his four small children. One would ride on his broad shoulders while the others poured sand over his crossed legs or tried
to impress him with their acrobatics. He’d grin at me from the midst of his clan, but he’d never invite me to join him.

“Benny, I’m too tired for a visit today, I’m worn out from the demo.” I took off my shoes and flopped down on my bed.

He sighed. “Why, why, why do you do these things? Where were you, anyhow?” He sat down at the edge of the bed.

I told him about the demonstration. It had not been reported on the news, he didn’t know it had taken place.

“The last place on earth I would want to be, the last thing on earth I would want to do,” he said, shaking his head.

“I’m sure there are a zillion things you would want to do even less,” I said. “Swallowing a live cockroach. Getting into a booth full of scorpions. Shooting a child.”

“You have an answer for everything.” He sighed again. “So I can’t stay? I just had another visit from Miriam, I need someone sane to talk to.”

“I’m sure I’m as messed up as Miriam. Come back later, I’m going to sleep.”

“Your eyes are red.”

“From the tear gas.”

“I can’t understand why you do these things to yourself. On behalf of people who are trying to kill you, people who cheer every time a bus with someone like you on it explodes.”

“Please, Benny. I’m tired.”

“Okay, I’m going, do you need anything?”

“Just sleep.”

“What does tear gas feel like?’ he asked, curious.

“It stings. Your lungs burn. You feel like throwing up, or at least I do. You get scared.”

“Poor Dana.”

“No, poor Palestinians.”

Benny sighed heavily. “You have a good heart, Dana, but you
refuse to see the writing on the wall. I’ll drop by later, unless business picks up.”

“Great.” I shut my eyes, and the sound of Benny shutting the door as he left was already mingling with a dream.

First Daniel and I fixed up our flat, then we married, and then we fought.

When Daniel and I bought the three rooms that became our ground-floor flat, they looked as if they’d drawn inspiration from those black-and-white Time-Life photos of inner-city blight: broken sinks, cakes of dirt in every corner, spotted mirrors nailed to the wall. Prostitutes had lived in the building, and they’d left behind not only mirrors but also their shiny damask bedspreads. Daniel was horrified when I suggested we wash the bedspreads and use them as sofa covers.

The building was also stained and run down. But this was prime seaside property, and even the smallest of the three flats was very expensive. Daniel’s parents were heavily in debt, so my father came to the rescue. “It’s the least I can do, duckie,” he said.

Daniel’s younger sister Nina moved in with their grandmother, though she chose to sleep in the living room and to use the converted balcony for meditation. Nina was twenty-two and recently divorced; she was also unemployed and “off men” for the time being. Moving in with Granny suited her; in any case it was better than going back to her parents’ house. At Granny’s she could play tapes of her guru’s teachings and listen to Ravi Shankar to her heart’s content. She had even started giving yoga lessons to Elena, the prim Russian woman who came to read to Granny, and who, as it turned out, had back problems.

Daniel and I set up a tent in one of the rooms and lived in it while we worked on the flat. We broke down walls, retiled the
floor, plastered and painted. Daniel was good with his hands, and he engraved small angels in the molding along the ceiling. The walls were replaced by arched passages: Daniel didn’t like doors.

When the flat was ready we folded up the tent and bought a bed and olive green sofas and a faded olive and pink Turkish carpet for the living room. Then we invited everyone we knew to celebrate our marriage. My father arrived without Gitte, who had lost her parents in an air crash and was afraid of flying. She sent profuse apologies and a charming tapestry of tiny happy people enjoying themselves in a park. The wedding party lasted all night: over three hundred guests crowded into the two empty apartments on the third floor, which we had illegally taken over for the evening. Eventually the party spread to the beach, where we danced to live music and stuffed ourselves with catered food until sunrise.

In the early morning, after all the guests had left, Daniel and I walked slowly back to our flat and flopped down onto the new green sofas. The caterers had tidied up, more or less, but gifts lay scattered everywhere, a sea of boxes and packages. The smell of grass and hashish and ordinary cigarette smoke hung heavily in the air.

“The emperors of hash and grass have fled,” I said, “leaving a trail behind them.”

“You’re more stoned than I thought.”

“I’m not. I didn’t smoke.”

“It’s enough to breathe in the air here.”

“It’s childish to humanize objects. I read that somewhere. But I can’t help it. You’ve married a childish person, Daniel.”

This was Daniel’s cue to say something affectionate and reassuring, but he didn’t answer. It was the first time he used silence against me, and I understood that we were moving toward a fight, though I was still hoping to stop it.

We were not used to discord. Until then we had only wondered,
day after day and night after night, at how alike we were: the coincidences were almost alarming, and had we been inclined toward mysticism we might have posited fantastic phenomena: twins in another lifetime, carriers of sibling souls. We had the same hairbrush and toothbrush; we owned the same scarf, which we had both picked up at the same street stall. Our handwriting was nearly identical. In high school we had both given oral presentations on manipulation in the media, and a week before we met we had clipped the same cartoon from the newspaper. We even had male and female versions of the same name.

And now, married, exhausted, trying to hold on to my happiness, I said, “I wonder how a person knows. I wonder how you know when you see someone that this person is right for you, just by watching them sing and tell dumb jokes onstage.”

“You must have a sixth sense, Dana. I had no clue at all.”

“I know.”

“I barely noticed you at the wedding.”

“Don’t rub it in!”

Again, Daniel said nothing. “You told me you thought I was cute,” I reminded him, still hoping to recapture the bliss I’d felt only seconds before. But it was no longer possible to avoid the tension in the air, which was sliding and slipping around us like a filament of barbed wire.

“I just wondered why you’d come in your uniform—I thought you were probably one of those people who wanted to show off that they were in the army.”

“I didn’t have a dress!”

“Yes, but I didn’t know that during the wedding.”

“What else? What else did you think?”

“That’s it.”

“And what about when I came up to you? What did you think then?”

“I figured you were horny.”

We’d had this conversation before—lovers always go back to the first innocent moments that spawned their love—but he had said kind and flattering things. “Weren’t you at all attracted to me as a person?”

“I didn’t know you.”

“You thought I was some sort of desperate, pathetic loser?”

“No, I just thought you wanted sex.”

“So … when were you sure?”

“Well, I’m sure now, of course.”

I got up from the sofa and stared at him. I felt the fury rising in me. “Now! You weren’t sure until now? Can I ask why you suggested getting married three days after we met?”

“You’re the one who suggested it, Dana. And I agreed, partly to help you get out of the army. I figured we could always get divorced if things didn’t work out.”

I burst into tears. I was heartbroken, and nothing he said could console me.

“I said ‘partly,’” he reminded me. “Partly to help you, partly because I thought I could fall in love with you. I’m not as impulsive as you are, Dana. I’m more cautious.”

“So it was all a big act,” I sobbed. “You were just pretending all along! You acted as if you were in love, otherwise I would never have brought up marriage!”

“I wasn’t pretending, I loved having sex with you.”

I stormed out of the flat and began walking along the main street: I didn’t want to be alone. It was too early for the usual bustle, but here and there I passed people heading out for early-morning jobs or returning from night shifts, and soon the stores and restaurants would be opening. I knew Daniel was following me but I didn’t turn. Finally I flopped down in exhaustion on a chair at a sidewalk café.

A few minutes later Daniel caught up with me. He ordered
coffee for both of us and sat down facing me across the round white table. He said, “I’m sorry, that came out wrong. I was afraid of my feelings for you, Dana. I didn’t trust you, and it had nothing to do with you, but with me—it’s hard for me to trust people right away. I’m not like you. What if I let myself go and then you left me? What if it was only a whim on your part? What if you did this all the time, went up to people and offered yourself? I couldn’t know. But you know how much I love you now, I’ve told you a hundred times. Men get nervous when they love a woman this much. It’s nerve-wracking, it makes us mean sometimes. You must be tired, Dana. Let’s take a taxi home and get into bed and say a prayer of thanks to the gods.” And right there, sitting at the table, he began to sing. He sang me one of his favorite songs.
Praise is due to the Creator for the dark and the light and the things that fly and the things that crawl and Noah and Cain and the fools and the prophets and the kings and your feet and your elbow and your smile and your light and the dark.

It was impossible to stay angry after that. We took a taxi back to our new flat as he’d suggested, and we got into bed and thanked the gods.

I didn’t wake up until evening. I was hot and sweaty; I had not turned on the air conditioner before I fell asleep. I was also confused by my dream: Benny was crouching by the bed, stroking my hair. It was a dream I often had, especially when I fell asleep during the day, and it baffled me a little. The sensation was pleasant and I yielded to it easily, though at the same time I always thought,
Good thing I’m asleep and this isn’t real life.

I turned on the air conditioner and returned to bed for a few minutes because I needed to come. Usually I fantasized about Daniel, though not about actual encounters we’d had: my fantasies
involved an imagined reunion in unfamiliar, faraway settings. On rare occasions Daniel was absent and I found myself conjuring surprising images of people I didn’t know.

When I was finished, I took off my black top, poured cool water over my shoulders, put on one of Daniel’s T-shirts, and went to check in on Volvo, my legless neighbor.

Volvo moved into the flat next to ours shortly after Daniel left. I saw at once that he was going to be difficult. His goal in life was apparently to impose his dark mood upon the entire world, and he reacted with bitter satisfaction to news of suffering and disaster. Since he had broken off all contact with his family and with friends he’d had before he lost his legs, it fell to me to look after him.

I did my best to make his dismal one-room flat habitable, and I arranged for a series of volunteers to come during the week. When no one was available, I helped him bathe and kept him company. On top of all his other problems, he had hemorrhoids, an ailment on which I was now unfortunately an expert. In the beginning he tried to drag me down with him by explaining that all happiness was immoral because what about the person next to you who had lost his legs? But he failed to convince me and he gave up and liked me for resisting. When he was in a particularly gloomy frame of mind he asked me to read him pornography, though he insisted that his interest in such things was purely scientific: he wanted to study the effect of sexual material on a man who had lost his sexuality along with his legs. I refused, and we compromised on
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
, a few selected passages from
Ulysses
, and the work of a well-known local poet who was famous for, among other things, his lurid, transgressive writing.