By Molly Antopol
Talia was in line at Café Noah when she noticed a man watching her. He was at the group table by the window, handsome in a nerdy, chaotic way, wearing a rumpled orange T-shirt and metallic glasses a shade lighter than his hair. He smiled. She smiled back. He smiled again, and Talia, interested more in the light buzz of flirtation than an actual conversation, gave him one last look, then tossed her change in the tip jar.
Out on Ahad Ha’am Street, people were clustered around little tables lining the sidewalk, sipping coffee and smoking leisurely though it was noon on a Wednesday. The sun was out after an entire April of rain, and as Talia rounded the corner, she wondered if she was the only person in all of Tel Aviv rushing back to eat at her desk, the only person who would have left the café so quickly when one day, she knew, these situations could magically stop presenting themselves. So she turned back—and saw the man in the orange T-shirt barreling toward her.
“Did I forget something?” she asked him.
“What?”
“In the café.”
“No,” he said. “You look familiar—Hebrew University?” and when she shook her head he said, “Maybe from the neighborhood?” Before Talia could think of an answer, before she could tilt her head and say “possibly” in an alluring and noncommittal way, rather than the truth, which was that, at twenty-nine, her career was shot, she’d moved back home with her parents in Rehovot, a half-hour south of the city, and the only reason she was even in the neighborhood was because she’d picked up fact-checking work nearby at the local paper they left out for free on trains and in Laundromats, Mr. Orange T-shirt blinked a couple times, then said, “Oh, fuck it. You were flirting with me in there, right?”
She had been flirting, and the realization made her feel better—at least it was interesting. Better than going back to her office, where a deadline and a morning’s worth of unopened emails loomed. The man looked about forty, with large blue eyes and pale, stubbled skin. Though they were standing still, he was out of breath, and his sense of personal space was off by a centimeter or two. She did a quick ring check and pegged him as recently divorced, the type who patrolled cafés for love during his lunch hour.
“It’s hard to tell,” he continued. “Maybe you were just being nice.”
“No,” Talia conceded, “I was flirting.” She’d said a lot of bold things in her life but never something so direct to a person she didn’t know, and it threw her so off-balance that when he started to walk, Talia fell into step with him. She was aware they were heading away from the paper, but she could feel the day breaking open. She liked that neither of them seemed to have a particular destination, that they were just ambling around, something she only did on vacation. They turned down a narrow street, and she watched two girls, quick and earnest, chase each other through a courtyard while an older man, several stories above, watered his plants. Everything felt squintingly bright and a little too in focus, as if she’d just stumbled into the daylight after a heavy night of drinking: the cloudless sky, the sparkly asphalt road, the squares of silver foil covering a woman’s hair in a salon window. At the corner Talia and the man made a right, then crossed a boulevard and walked up another road until they were standing in front of a junior high school. “I have to go,” he said, and Talia realized that on her supposedly aimless, carefree walk she’d actually followed this man back to work.
“You’re a teacher?” She felt so exposed. What had she expected—to run off to some hotel room together; that an hour with a stranger, something she only right then realized she’d even been contemplating, was going to fix everything?
“I have a meeting with the principal. My daughter’s been cutting class.”
“I was terrible in school,” Talia said, to say something. “I cheated on all my tests.”
“I’m late,” he said, “but can I call you?”
Talia hesitated. But she liked his messy hair and light eyes and the open and slightly injured way he stared at her, so she gave him her work number. “Thanks,” he said, buoyant with approval.
He waved and sprinted across the street. At the sidewalk he turned around. “I’m Tomer,” he yelled.
“Talia,” she called back.
“Ah,” he yelled. “Dahlia. What a beautiful name,” and then dashed up the steps of the school, disappearing into the crowd of teenagers being beckoned inside.
* * *
She was surprised to discover how giddy she felt when Tomer didn’t wait the requisite three days to phone but did so that afternoon, when she was still at her desk, waiting for a callback on a story.
“Do you like food?” he said when she picked up.
“Only when I’m hungry.”
“Indian food,” he said, as if it were her problem for not inferring that in his question. “There’s a new place on Rothschild that has the best curry, made by guys from Goa. They cook it different there.”
“I know,” she said. “I’ve been.”
“What are the chances?”
“I’d say they’re pretty high,” she said. Asking a Tel Avivian if they’d been to Goa was like asking if they’d been to Jerusalem, and in fact the main reason Talia lasted only a month in India was that it had felt like an extension of college, the army, her old neighborhood in Rehovot. She’d left Israel to meet new people, not to run into her neighbor on a trek through Netravali or her father’s cousin Rivka at a full-moon beach party. And so, when a job finally opened in Kiev, Talia had taken off immediately. When are you coming back? her parents would ask during their weekly calls—they thought she was insane for wanting to report on the very city her grandparents had worked so hard to leave. The moment Talia heard their voices, she felt as if she’d been yanked across the Mediterranean and transported back home, her father on the porch listening to the radio, her mother always beside him, shelling fava beans or peeling beets, her two sisters chasing after their toddlers while their husbands relaxed on the lawn.
“Things are working out here,” Talia would tell them, wondering how just having them on the end of the line could make her feel as defensive as she’d been at sixteen. Though they never said it outright, she could hear the question that always lurked beneath: when was she going to get this silly rebelliousness out of her system and move home to start a family? But the truth was that things had been working out. Talia had wanted to be a reporter since she could remember, and it had stunned her, sitting in her cubicle in Kiev, that her life was actually unfolding the way she had fantasized. She’d started at the Jerusalem bureau of an American paper right out of college, doing whatever grunt work was needed: filing, fact-checking, going on coffee runs when the intern was busy. But her English was near-fluent, and after years of begging and badgering the bureau chief, he finally started giving her work, as if the very behavior that had gotten her sent to the corner as a child was the thing that garnered his respect.
It was true, he had said, that she was living in one of the hardest countries to find staff jobs: no one ever left their positions at the Israeli papers, and reporters from all over the world competed for work at the foreign ones. But with her language skills—she also had Ukrainian from her grandparents and Russian from college, probably the one time her Slavic literature degree made her more employable—he’d lobby the higher–ups in Chicago to send her to Kiev if things got bad enough to need someone on the ground. That was four years ago, in the fall of 2004, and Talia remembered sitting in the flickering, fluorescent–lit conference room of the Jerusalem bureau, watching it all unfold on TV—the election fraud allegations, Yushchenko’s terrifying, ever-changing face—and holding on to a shameful, selfish hope for things to keep spiraling.
She’d always felt so envious of the other reporters at her paper in Jerusalem, none of them Israeli, all of them cabbing over to the bar at the American Colony Hotel every night after work, as if living out some vintage fantasy. They were all smart, they all spoke the language, many had relatives there and knew the country even before they were hired. But there was something so romantic about the way they saw their jobs, sinking into chairs in the garden bar, press passes still dangling from their necks, immediately launching into thrilling tales of how they were this close to danger that day, before pausing and taking a handful of the free cashews on the table. Even her bureau chief, whom Talia genuinely admired, still acted as though he was playing the part of the daredevil reporter, always driving himself into the territories, traveling with a separate passport through Lebanon and Syria, as if relentlessly performing for a rapt, imaginary audience back home in Chicago. It had always bothered Talia, listening to them debate her country’s politics, when it was implicitly understood that the moment their brushes with danger went from being this close to way too fucking close, they could leave. But then she was given the same opportunity, to be lifted from her life and plunked down in a place to which she had an even flimsier connection than many of her coworkers had to Israel, and she’d found herself guilty of that same excitement. Anyone would have felt it covering the demonstrations, of course. But she’d been just as amped in the months that followed, sitting in the stuffy, windowless media room in the district courthouse, or transcribing at her desk for hours, eating meal after meal of crackers with chocolate spread, as if everything took on a significance she’d never felt back home: the thrill of living on the other side of the glass.
Even the things in Kiev that should have frustrated her—the weather, the drunks who catcalled her on her way to work, the horrible bureaucracy that made even cashing her paycheck feel like that nightmare where she was walking down a long hallway and every door led to yet another endless hallway of doors—seemed funny and removed, as if they were simply anecdotes in an elaborate story she’d tell one day to her own imaginary audience back home. Her office building in Kiev housed foreign correspondents from all over the world, and she loved how easily they buffered the loneliness of living in a new place, heading down to Baraban, which had quickly become their default bar, every evening after work. Those nights, squeezed into a booth with her office mates and a roving crew of aid workers and NGO groupies, even her life in Israel seemed a little lighter, a little more entertaining, than it had actually been—as if she weren’t even describing her own neighborhood, her own family, but a cast of pushy and lovable characters on some wacky sitcom.
Then came the financial crash and her bureau chief called from Jerusalem with the news that the Chicago paper was closing some of its foreign desks, Kiev among them. It had nothing to do with her work, he said—they just couldn’t afford to keep her when they could get copy from the AP. “Try not to panic,” he said. “What’s that saying about things going to shit right before they’re good again?” He laughed, but it came out as more of a hiccup. Then he cleared his throat and suggested she go freelance. Which Talia did, though soon even that became difficult and she had to cut her rates by half, and one night she walked over to Baraban for a much-needed drink and found the place full of twentysomething American bloggers. A few months before she’d had a bad and wholly forgettable night with one of them—Ethan from Michigan—and had prayed he’d gone back to the States once jobs became scarce. But instead it appeared he’d invited all his friends from college to set up shop there, a cluster of them laughing and yelling in English, the other patrons forced to weave around their power cords, as if the Americans and their laptops had become as essential to the bar as its wobbly chairs and shelves of bottles that lined the wall.
“You’re lucky,” one of her old office mates said. He seemed to have implanted himself at the bar since his own layoff, and had the sallow pallor of a man who’d spent too many consecutive days drinking indoors. “You can go home and some war will start up again.” He was Danish, and Talia detected a spark of envy in his gaze. “Go back and wait,” he said. So Talia wrote to every contact she had in Israel, including her former boss at the American paper, who said he’d gotten word that they were now closing all the foreign desks and reshuffling the staff back home, and that he could tell her exactly what the job market was like, because after thirty-three years he was back in it, groveling for positions at wires he’d been overqualified for two decades ago. The one place where he could put in a call for her, he said, was at Boker Yisraeli. It was the free city paper the two of them used to mock, singsonging the glowing profiles of the wealthy businessmen who clearly funded it and their Judaica artist wives.
Part Two
Talia knew she had no choice but to gratefully accept the offer. And though it was even worse than the first job she’d taken out of college, and though the pay was so low she’d had to move back in with her parents, back into her childhood bedroom, which was no longer her bedroom but her mother’s extended storage closet, the key, she told Tomer later that week at the Indian place, was to view her time home as a disappointing but brief blip in her real life abroad. “I’ve been home two months and I’ll stay through the summer,” she said. “The only way to get back into reporting is to be a one-man band, and the second I’ve saved enough for a video camera, editing software and sound equipment, I’m leaving again. But for now I’m here, fact-checking the features.”
“I know,” Tomer said, spearing a chickpea. “I Googled you.”
Talia frowned. “You’re not supposed to say that.”
“I found a couple stories you wrote on Yushchenko.”
“Oh,” she said, trying to sound offended, though the idea of him searching for her online was oddly flattering: she couldn’t even get her own family to feign interest. Tomer had seemed so nervous and overeager outside Café Noah, but here, signaling the waiter for another order of naan, he was surprisingly at ease. Or, rather, at ease with his overeagerness, as if he knew it afforded him an accessible charm. He was more attractive than she remembered, a large, hairy man with the harmless and comforting quality of a stuffed bear. The entire time she’d been talking he’d sat there smiling, as if experiencing a certain delight just being across the table from her. There was something so reassuring in that—for all the stress and disappointment she’d been feeling the past few months, all she had to do was share a meal with this man to get him to light up.
“And that piece on Gongadze,” he said. “Do you have a boyfriend back in Kiev?”
“We broke up. When did you get divorced?”
“How do you know I’m divorced?”
“You have that look about you,” Talia said. “Like you just ran out of a burning building.”
“Well,” he said, “we’re not divorced. She died.”
Talia twisted the napkin in her lap. Tomer picked up his fork, as if all he could focus on was his curry, and she wished the waiter would appear with a water refill or a dessert menu, anything to break the silence. “When?” she said, finally. “That’s horrible.”
“Sixteen months next week.” Then he stopped. “I’m making you uncomfortable. What’s this one-man band—you’d do all the reporting and filming yourself?”
“Yes,” Talia said, more quickly than she intended. Then she said, “It’s okay. You should talk about it,” but when he started to, his gaze shifted right past her, as if he were staring at some indeterminate spot on the wall. He’d met Efrat after the army, he said, through a friend of a friend here in Tel Aviv. They’d spent their twenties breaking up and getting back together, filling their lives with the unnecessary drama kids always do, Tomer said, as if he’d forgotten, or hadn’t noticed to begin with, that Talia was still muddling through the tail end of that decade, the graduating senior showing up at all the high school parties. “We married at thirty and had our daughter Gali a year later. We kept telling ourselves we wanted to wait until we had everything figured out,” Tomer said. “First we had no money, then Efrat was getting her catering business off the ground, and then my job started taking over—I’m a contractor, mostly vacation homes in Herzliya,” he said, almost as an afterthought, as if he’d only now remembered he was on a first date. Talia already knew that (she’d Googled him, too), so she said, “And then?”
“And then we went skiing in France. Our splurge every couple years. I was with Gali in the lodge and Efrat went on one more run. She came back looking dazed and said she’d fallen and hit her head. She said it hurt but that it wasn’t a big deal. But that’s what Efrat said about everything. So I took her to our room to rest. And she seemed fine. The next morning she still had a headache and wanted to stay in and nap. She told Gali and me not to waste a day hanging around inside when we could be skiing. So we left. While we were gone she went out for some air, and on her way back into the lodge she dropped to her knees and started vomiting. And then she just tipped over. Right on the deck and everyone ran out, and when Gali and I got the news we were on top of a mountain. No one knew it was a brain injury, at first they thought she was drunk. And everyone kept saying how lucky we were that Gali was with me, that she didn’t see it. They kept saying we were lucky.”
Tomer was speaking quickly, his eyes darting around the restaurant as if he couldn’t quite believe what he was saying was actually real, let alone that he was divulging it to a near stranger, and he kept lifting his glass and setting it down, as if he could no longer remember its use.
He pushed his plate away and stared at his lap. His hands were wrapped so tightly Talia could see the crescents his nails made in his skin, and she had never, in her entire life, felt so bad for another person. She’d interviewed people who had lost loved ones in fires, bus accidents, a massive train wreck outside Kharkiv that killed forty-three people, but this—being alone with a man so openly grieving—was even harder to watch. A waiter cleared their dishes, and as Tomer continued to talk, about his therapy sessions and his daughter who, he said, was essentially a good girl but, at fourteen, going through what one of her teachers called a “very understandably difficult phase,” something strange happened, something Talia wouldn’t want to admit to anyone: She realized she was enjoying herself. That she hadn’t, if she was going to be completely honest, had such a good time in months. Getting Tomer to sidestep the terrible first-date small talk and move straight to the core of things was making Talia feel, for the first time since she’d lost her job, like a journalist. This was what she was good at: being the blank, understanding face across the table; putting people so at ease they revealed the things they didn’t want to share with anyone, the things they wished didn’t exist at all.
“I’m sorry,” Tomer said, reaching for the check. “You’re the first person I’ve been to dinner with and I probably shouldn’t be let out of the house.”
And though Talia knew he was right, and though she knew there probably wasn’t a man less ready to date in all of Tel Aviv, possibly the entire Middle East, somehow that was making him all the more appealing. Since coming home she’d felt it impossible to hold on to the spontaneity she’d embraced so effortlessly in Kiev, as if it had been confiscated with her liquids when she passed through airport security. The past couple weeks she’d found herself waking in the middle of the night, startled and breathless, the top and bottom sheets untucked and twisted around her, her feet hanging off the edge of her narrow bed. It occurred to her now that she might as well enjoy herself while she was stuck back here, and that if there was one person even less equipped for anything substantial, it was the man across from her. And so as she watched him sift through his wallet for his credit card, such a jumbled mess of shekels and receipts it more resembled her mother’s kitchen junk drawer than something he could actually slip back into the pocket of his jeans, Talia said, “I’m not looking for anything serious, but I’m guessing you haven’t had sex in a while—”
“Sixteen months,” Tomer seemed to shout. He stood up and sat beside her, and then he pounced on her, like a squirrel spotting a nut in the distance. He smelled more boyish than she would have imagined, and he was a desperate, handsy kisser who used his tongue right away. There was something about being pushed against the leather booth right there in the restaurant that made her feel as if she were shrinking in a weirdly pleasurable way, as if she were becoming half a woman, no longer the Talia with her name in print, who always needed to be working, traveling, writing—all of that was gone now and there she was, a pared-down version of herself, perfectly balanced beneath this man.
“Ilivesixblocksaway,” Tomer said all in one breath.
“But your daughter.”
“She’s staying at a friend’s,” he said, taking her hand and leading her out. He lived in Neve Tzedek, one of the prettiest parts of the city, with its cracked brick roads and squat stucco houses, orange and white and pink as the bougainvillea that snaked through fences and blanketed the roofs. Tucked between the beach and the high-rises that blinked and hovered overhead, the neighborhood always made Talia wish she’d been an adult here in the nineties, before all the wine bars and gelato shops and French millionaires moved in—a time when, Tomer said, unlatching his gate, he and Efrat had been smart enough to buy. A rusty bicycle was parked outside and all the plants in the terra-cotta pots hissed dryly in the wind. He unlocked the door and ushered her inside, where the lights were on and the stereo was up at full blast, some bass-heavy electronica that Talia didn’t recognize.
“Gali!” Tomer yelled, and when his daughter emerged from her bedroom, the telltale sign of too much air freshener wafted out with her. “Seriously?” he said, flicking off the music.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Gali said.
“I thought you were sleeping at Dana’s.”
“I thought you were on a date.”
“So you threw a party?”
“It wasn’t a party. No one’s here.”
Tomer looked at Talia—for alliance, support, she didn’t know what. Gali, for her part, seemed to have had the foresight to use eyedrops before they came home, but the way she kept tugging on her ponytail let Talia know she was high. She was pretty, Talia thought, with full cheeks and brown eyes and thick blond curls, but obviously still learning to apply makeup: her concealer a shade off, her black eyeliner heavy and frightening. Plus she had on so many plastic necklaces and bangles that the whole effect was dizzying and distracting, and Talia wondered why no one had told her she was overdoing it. Certainly not her father, whose idea of fashion seemed to be to pull the top shirt and pair of pants from his dresser, which meant that one day Tomer could look haphazardly artsy, like that first time in Café Noah, and another, like tonight, as if he’d gotten dressed in the dark.
“Yes?” Gali said then, and Talia realized she’d been staring.
“I’m Talia,” she stammered. Gali nodded, then put her hands on her hips and shot a look that sent her straight back to junior high, and Talia wondered why she was still standing there. She took a step back and Tomer whispered, “Please don’t leave,” so she slipped into what looked like his room and closed the door behind her. It was tidy and small, with turquoise walls and furniture Tomer and Efrat must have hauled in off the street and stripped and repainted themselves. This was exactly the kind of place Talia would have picked out—not just the apartment but the way they’d decorated it, everything mismatched but so carefully chosen. Tucked into the dresser mirror were photos of the three of them through the years: on the tiled apartment steps Talia had just walked up; in a restaurant; in a park at what looked like Gali’s first birthday, sitting on Efrat’s lap. Efrat was attractive in the sort of way women noticed as much as men: laughing at whoever was holding the camera, her long blond hair in a frazzled knot, holding her daughter by the shoulders as if they were both about to tip over. Tomer was squatted beside them, his mouth open and eyes wide, as though he were making silly faces to get baby Gali to coo.
Talia sat on the bed and listened. She knew she should leave—it seemed only sensible—but couldn’t find the will. Gali’s story was growing increasingly elaborate and Tomer was caving, and Talia could see when he walked in now, wearing the tired and gentle look of defeat, that his daughter had won this round.
“Didn’t she know you’d be back tonight?” Talia said.
Tomer took off his glasses and nodded. “And now,” he said, lowering his voice, as if Gali could hear anything above the music she’d flung back on, “I look like a pushover.”
“True.” Talia regretted the word even before it had left her mouth—it couldn’t be fun bringing a date home to witness this. But Tomer just flopped beside her on his stomach and said, “I can’t believe I got caught with a woman. I guess we’ll have to get married now.”
He had to be joking. But something in his voice, low and tender, made Talia wonder if a nugget of truth existed within those words—if he just might not be wired for a one-night thing. She stood up.
“I was kidding,” Tomer said. He reached for her, but she intercepted his hand. “I’m sorry,” she said.
He looked hurt, in a puppyish and confused way, as if he didn’t completely get it. He rolled onto his back. “Okay,” he said, sighing. “I’ll call you.”
On her way out, she passed his daughter’s door, cracked halfway open. “Nice to meet you too,” Gali called out, as if Talia were the rude one, so she poked her head in. Papers and makeup littered the carpet in messy but distinct piles, as if a complex order existed that only Gali understood, and the entire room smelled of burnt hair and nail polish. She was lying on her unmade bed with her hands behind her head. “You’re leaving?” she said.
“It’s late,” Talia said, though she had no idea what time it was. “I work early.”
Gali squinted at her suspiciously. “What do you do?”
“I’m a reporter,” Talia said, and when Gali said, “That’s cool,” Talia felt as if she were letting them both down when she admitted, “I’m actually between jobs. Right now I’m fact-checking for Boker Yisraeli, the free paper? I kind of hate it.”
“Sucks.”
“It does suck.” The music was so loud that Talia’s cheeks throbbed, but at least she felt a little hipper for recognizing the song that came on. “I love Kaveret,” she said. “They were my first concert.”
“My dad likes them, too,” Gali said. “My mom was kind of a music snob and this was one of the things we could all agree on, in the car and stuff.” She said it so matter-of-factly, and Talia wondered if this was casual conversation or if Gali, for whatever reason—the pot, perhaps?—was opening up.
“I’ve got a bunch of Yitzhak Klepter’s solo stuff on vinyl you can borrow. Come over sometime,” Talia said, immediately wishing she could retract it. She had a habit of over-offering when she was nervous and wanted people to like her, but why did it matter what this fourteen-year-old thought?
“Thanks.” Then Gali lay against her pillows and looked up at the ceiling, and Talia stood there, not knowing whether the girl wanted her to leave or stay, or why she even cared. “See you,” Gali said finally, and when Talia backed into the hall, Gali lifted her leg, and with one bare, red toenailed foot, kicked the door shut.
Part Three
“I admit that didn’t go perfectly,” Tomer said when he called her at work the following morning, so early Talia was still blowing on her to-go cup of coffee. “We just need to try again.”
“It’s a bad idea,” Talia said, clicking through her email. She was determined not to give him her full attention. “And,” she said, emboldened, suddenly, by the distance between her office and wherever Tomer was calling from, “maybe think twice before bringing someone else home to your daughter.”
“I made a mistake,” he said. “I’m a human being.”
“I’m sorry.”
“She’s gone this weekend. On a class trip to the Golan.”
“I’m hanging up now.”
“Let me make you dinner this weekend. My famous baked chicken.”
“Tomer,” Talia said, “this is nonnegotiable.” There was no point in making her life this cluttered. Not when she was leaving, not when these weren’t her problems. Not when the last thing his daughter needed was a new woman around. (Or was it what she needed most, and wasn’t that an even bigger reason to stay away?) That was what she told herself after she hung up and immersed herself in the details of a story so dull she wanted to bang her head against the desk, calling the kosher certification board to hear their latest verdict on swordfish, and whether a restaurant open on Shabbat could even claim the fish was kosher if the board deemed it so, and at lunchtime she went around the corner to the falafel place on the off chance that Tomer was at Café Noah. That was what she told herself all through dinner with her family and the following day at work, and even as she passed her bus stop home and strode into a market in Neve Tzedek, where she walked right up to the grocer and asked which wine he thought went best with baked chicken.
She’d imagined sex with Tomer would be primitive and charged, that they’d have ripped off each other’s skin if they could. But he was slow and nervous and kept his eyes open the whole time. At one point, he stroked her cheek in a way that felt so stagey and cinematic she wondered if he was going through the moves Efrat had liked, if she was a stand-in for his wife. But then he turned to her, and the expression on his face seemed to be only for Talia: filled with desire and gratitude and something close to joy.
Afterward they lay around for hours. Talia had forgotten how much she liked that time, when everything—the rough folds of Tomer’s elbows, the coin-sized scar on the back of his thigh, from when he’d fallen off his bike as a kid—was new and interesting and had a story. She liked how purely herself she could be around him, initiating sex when she wanted it, clicking on the stereo without asking, sifting through his dresser for an undershirt. She liked how, when she woke the following morning in that tiny turquoise room, the kettle was hissing and milk was on the counter, and when they walked out to the terrace off the kitchen, the rest of the city was going about their day. She’d forgotten about them. About everyone—and yet there they were, still functioning as though nothing had changed: a line of people outside Tazza d’Oro, a woman leaning against a Vespa and laughing into her cell phone, a black dog barking on a roof.
She couldn’t remember falling for someone so quickly and kept waiting for a gust of reality to swoop in and slap her out of her daze. For an awkward silence in which they realized how little they actually knew each other, or a moment when she’d step unwittingly onto some emotional land mine. Or simply for boredom to settle in, because as much as Talia liked hearing other people’s stories, the excitement of sharing her own, of pulling down the sheet to reveal her own scar from falling off her bike as a girl, then the one, higher up her thigh, where she’d sat on a rusty nail, felt, with every new relationship, more and more perfunctory. It was like a monologue she’d developed sometime between the army and college, which she updated periodically with new noteworthy events, putting less and less effort into every subsequent performance. But it was easier with Tomer. His questions were so thoughtful, so careful, that they immediately pulled her out of her routine, wanting to know names, places, unpacking even the tiniest anecdotes, as if learning about her was a serious task that demanded his concentration. She couldn’t tell if he’d always been this way with women, or if it had to do with being married so long—that perhaps dating a man who had so fully loved and admired and accepted another person allowed Talia to cross a threshold so effortlessly she hadn’t even realized she’d done it until she was safely on the other side.
On the second morning, she dressed and found Tomer in the living room with a tray of omelets and toast and coffee on the rug beside him. Talia was touched that while she was sleeping, he’d been quietly setting this up. He kissed her and handed her the paper, and she reflexively scanned the international pages for the bylines. There in Moscow, covering Medvedev’s swearing–in ceremony, was Ethan, that American blogger. Talia’s chest ached, wondering how she’d ended up fact-checking the swordfish kosher debate while this guy got to break one of the biggest stories of the year, for an international wire no less. He’d barely even known enough Russian or Ukrainian to order a beer—something Talia had discovered that night she’d first met him at Baraban, that night she’d ordered a few too many herself before taking him home. But now there he was, parachuting around Europe, building up clips. That night at the bar, he’d struck her as overconfident and young, one of those reporters whose interest in Ukraine only sparked once the protests began, and who expressed no qualms about leaving the country the moment a hotter story appeared. But he was cute and she was drunk and figured she was abroad so why not. The sex had been clumsy and fast and had sobered her up immediately, and afterward she’d looked at his hairless arm, flung across his eyes, at his cargo pants and suede Adidas sneakers strewn on her apartment floor, and told herself to ignore the regret that was already swelling into her throat—it was nothing but a silly, onetime mistake with a guy she’d eventually never have to see, or even think about, again.
But there he was, in Tomer’s living room, his byline taunting her about all the things she was missing. Then she felt ashamed—what kind of journalist had she become, so jealous she hadn’t written the article that she wasn’t the least bit interested the inauguration was even happening?—especially when the story was admittedly pretty good. That was when Tomer looked up from the food section, alarmed, and said, “Gali said she’d call from the Golan. She said she would and she hasn’t.”
“Call her,” Talia said, and Tomer said, “You’re right. Of course you’re right.” But when his daughter picked up, he shushed Talia, though she hadn’t said a word. “How’s it going?” he said, his voice suddenly a full octave higher. He sprang from the carpet and began to nervously pace the room, as if he were on a conference call with the prime minister and the national security advisor and the entire defense cabinet. It bothered Talia that he was so afraid of his daughter, though she’d herself felt too timid to open Gali’s door all weekend, as if there were a hidden camera lurking in that den of makeup and curling irons and stashed bags of marijuana. Plus hearing Tomer on the phone was nagging Talia to call her own parents, whom she hadn’t spoken to since she’d checked in to say she’d be gone all weekend. And though they were easygoing about it, the fact that they didn’t grill her just made Talia certain the third degree would be waiting when she got home. Which was just so frustrating, she told Tomer after he hung up, when she was almost thirty years old.
“Why do they get to you so much?” he said, and she was about to say they didn’t, that she was just being dramatic, when it occurred to her he genuinely wanted to know. So she told him she loved her parents, that they were warm and dependable and unbelievably generous to let her come crawling back home, but that they were just so judgmental and involved. Even thinking about them now made Talia feel tired: everyone gathered together in the loud, messy house on a hill not far from the airport, where her father and brothers-in-law all worked as mechanics.
“It doesn’t sound bad,” Tomer said. “Having so many people around.”
“It wasn’t bad,” she said. “Growing up.” In fact, there were parts she had loved. Living in a neighborhood where everyone knew each other, her summers a blurry series of days sprinting through the backyards of all her friends. She loved the sea, the heat, sleeping with her windows open much of the year. She loved the expansiveness of her parents’ property, hills on one side, a kibbutz on the other. When she and her sisters were younger, they used to sneak onto the kibbutz at night and hang out in the date palms, careful to avoid the toxic thorns that covered the trunks. Talia had been spiked dozens of times, but even then she had wanted to be close to dangerous, exciting things. The pricklers would pierce her skin—a strange, numbing wound that always made her sisters cry but that Talia would give herself over to. They had a pact: whatever was said up there wouldn’t leave the kibbutz, and there was something so simple, so clarifying, about those nights—everything in her life seemed solvable among those trees. She even loved the walk back home, the highway desolate, the road so dark she couldn’t distinguish where the hills ended and the sky began.
She could go on, she told Tomer—there were a million things she’d missed about home. But there was no denying how painful it was to be in a family that had always seemed so confused by her for stubbornly studying the languages of all the places they’d never go, as if it were some geeky form of rebellion, rather than what learning them had always been to her, a shield against loneliness. They’d never said outright that they didn’t respect her work, but they never read her stories either—whereas at even the hint of a boyfriend they couldn’t stop talking.
“I think in their hearts they won’t think I’m safe until I’m married with kids,” she said. “And living down the street from them.”
“Well, I’m glad I met you,” Tomer said. “Even if you hate being back.”
Talia looked at him. “It’s not that simple.”
“I get it. You went to bed a journalist and woke up a fact-checker.”
“It’s more than that,” she said. “You don’t know what it’s like—to have invested your whole life in something that doesn’t exist anymore.”
“I do know,” he said, with such emphasis that it came to her all at once. Of course he knew.
She wasn’t sure whether she should lean over and kiss him, or simply hold him close, or something else entirely. Then Talia saw his blank, distant gaze and knew she wasn’t expected to do anything. She wasn’t even sure Tomer was aware she was still in the room. It was as if he’d opened his mouth and tumbled directly into some dark, private tunnel whose entrance Talia couldn’t see. He couldn’t even sit through a moment like this, reading the paper on the floor while long rectangles of light came in through the window, Talia thought, because it was still incomprehensible that this was now his life. She looked around this adult apartment, with its coffee-table books and actual art on the walls, at the care Tomer and Efrat must have put into every detail, following their own private manual of what a beautiful marriage should look like. And now here was Tomer, hunched on the floor, pain shooting past his eyes. This was all so scarily mature, Talia thought. She knew she was doing nothing good for him by being there. She was still sipping her juice and flipping through the paper, but all the while her mind churned for a way out of this. She’d never been good at breakups—-and in fact had ended things with a boyfriend in Kiev in such a passive, roundabout way that he’d sat around Baraban telling all their friends he’d broken up with her. Here she knew to do it quickly, a needle in the arm before the nurse counted to three. She scooted beside him, conjuring up the least hurtful way to phrase it, when Tomer said, “This is happening too fast, isn’t it?”
“I’m just not ready to be part of—this,” she said, gesturing clumsily around her. “I’m sorry.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ve felt better with you than I have all year. But it’s like I forgot how to enjoy myself.”
“You will again.” Talia wished she could say it with certainty.
“I used to be the kind of person who could eat a really good sandwich and that would be enough,” Tomer said. “And now I walk around and see people laughing, at the movies or wherever, and it’s like I’m a separate species.”
“But with me you feel better?”
“Definitely better than before.”
“Did your therapist teach you to talk that way?”
“Gali and I go to him together. He’s good. But you want to know the truth? All the stuff I’m supposed to do with you in the beginning, all the not saying what’s on my mind . . . it just feels exhausting. It’s like I’m learning how to put sentences together again.”
Talia’s heart jogged, thinking about him struggling through every minute.
“But you’re leaving,” Tomer said. “Let’s say that if in five years you’re back in the country and I’m less of a mess, we’ll try again.”
“Deal,” she said, wondering how such a self-proclaimed disaster could be this deft at breakups. She kissed him goodbye, and when he kissed her back, she decided not to overthink it as she followed him into the bedroom. They fell back on his mattress, pulling up shirts, kicking off pants, spending so many hours back in bed that when Talia finally looked up, the sun was going down. Tomer propped himself on an elbow and smiled at her. “I forgot how good breakup sex is,” he said, and Talia pushed away her niggling disappointment at the finality of his comment, when it had been just as much her idea. She slipped on her clothes and headed down the block, and when the bus pulled up and Talia took a seat in the back, exhaustion swooped right in. Ending things was so obviously the right idea, she told herself, gazing out the window at the rows of baby palms lining Har Zion Street. A prostitute leaned against one of them, pulling at her nylons, probably beginning her day just as Talia was ending hers.
Then Tomer called. “I found your hair band under my pillow. I miss you.”
“I miss you too. But Tomer—”
“I know, we’re broken up,” he said in singsong. “What are you doing?”
“I’m watching an Orthodox guy pick up a prostitute. He’s acting like he’s asking for directions.”
“Ah,” Tomer said dreamily, and Talia said she had to go. The only way to get over this, she knew, was to put him out of her head. And though she thought she was doing a decent job of it, Talia wasn’t home fifteen minutes before her mother looked up from the table, which they were setting for dinner, and said, “What’s his name?”
“He’s just a guy, okay?” Talia said, knowing she sounded more like Gali than she wanted to admit. “I’m sorry,” she tried. “It’s just weird talking about something that turned out to be nothing.” She glanced around the kitchen, at the scratched wood table, stained with decades of art projects and baking disasters; at the stack of bills on the chair; at the new counters Talia’s father had promised to install for her mother’s fiftieth birthday, still half-finished as he waited for a time they could afford to complete the project. Her parents weren’t planning to interrogate her tonight about her love life, Talia thought. It was seven-thirty and her father wasn’t even home from work. This was the year he was supposed to retire and instead he’d signed on for two more.
“It’s good being back,” Talia blurted, but it came out as more of a question. She pulled her mother into a hug. Talia was shocked by how tiny she felt, her shoulders delicate and narrow as a girl’s.
Part Four
Talia woke the following morning feeling gratefully, dizzily free of Tomer, as if the whole relationship were a brief and delirious flu she had kicked with aspirin and hot tea and a night back in her own bed. Even coming home from work that evening felt comforting, and she surprised herself by offering to cook dinner while her mother worked in the garden and her father puttered around the garage. She was chopping eggplant when her mother walked in and said a girl outside was looking for her.
Gali was standing in the driveway, the whole dusky sky behind her, wide sweeps of orange and gray. She was panting and her eye makeup was smeared, as if she’d just stopped crying, or was about to start all over again. “You live in the middle of nowhere,” she said. “I got lost even from the bus stop.”
“How do you know where I live?”
“I looked you up.”
“Gali.” Talia wished she could be done with the conversation before it even began. “You know your dad and I broke up.”
“Yeah, it’s obvious. He’s pretty much been on his period since I came home last night.”
“Then why—” Talia struggled with a tactful way to phrase it, then gave up and said, “are you here?”
Gali was kicking gravel around with her sandal, and for a second she didn’t answer. Then she mumbled, “You said we could listen to records?”
Talia stared out at the silhouettes of olive trees on the distant brown hilltops, the city hidden beyond. Winding up the road, so quickly dirt flew out behind, was a silver truck, and as it came closer Talia could see Tomer behind the wheel. He threw the truck in park and hopped out. He looked like he was coming straight from work, in jeans and boots and a button-down, his cell phone clipped to his belt loop. Even before he opened his mouth, Gali stiffened and said, “Where was I supposed to go?”
“Nowhere,” Tomer said. “Because you’re grounded.”
“I can’t believe you followed me,” Gali said.
“I can’t believe you stormed out of the house like a three-year-old.” Then he turned to Talia. “I’m sorry my daughter’s so rude, showing up unannounced.”
“And I’m sorry my father’s such a two-face,” Gali said, “sneaking into my room and going through my stuff.”
“And I’m sorry my daughter gives me so many reasons to think I need to search her things.”
“Talia?” her mother called through the kitchen window, and Talia, never so grateful for an interruption, said, “It’s dinner, so—”
“We’d love to,” Gali said, and before she knew it they were all walking up the path and squeezing around the table, passing lentils and eggplant and salad as if this were perfectly natural, as if middle-aged men and their sullen teenage daughters frequently showed up looking for Talia.
And yet she seemed to be the only uncomfortable one. Tomer and Gali had calmed down and everyone was acting like such adults, so adept at skirting awkwardness with talk of the latest bribery charges against the prime minister and his upcoming talks with Syria. Even Gali seemed nervous and polite and almost docile at that table with people she didn’t know, as if, when no longer controlling the joystick to her life, she was actually a good kid. Her voice was so soft she had to repeat herself when asking for seconds. She finished her food and excused herself to make a phone call, slipping down the hall so quietly it was as if she’d been replaced with a better version of herself.
Tomer was an enthusiastic eater, piling thirds onto his plate, praising everything from the lentils to the lemon slices in the water, while Talia’s mother beamed, warming under the light of a handsome, younger man. Talia looked around, trying to see what Tomer did. Her father was still in his work shirt, chest hair trellising up the collar, and her mother’s face was shiny from weeding the garden. She’d been prettier than Talia, with high cheekbones and a full, easy smile, but Talia had known her parents for too long to have any idea what they actually looked like now.
“This is great,” Tomer said, and her mother, in the same prodding voice that had always sent Talia reeling to her room, said,
“I just heard a little outside, but it sounds like things have been rough.”
“Sixteen months,” Tomer said, though her mother had obviously been referring to Gali. “It feels so unreal.” He set down his fork. “I’m sorry.”
“No,” her mother said. “Please. We want to hear,” and then Tomer scraped his chair back and put his head in his hands and told the entire story. About the ski trip, about the injury, about everyone assuming she was drunk. “I was on a mountain when I heard the news,” Tomer said, and all at once Talia’s mother started crying. Her father grunted, his equivalent to tears. Tomer had the same far-off look from that night at the Indian place, and Talia felt weirdly robbed hearing him repeat the story, but also ashamed for turning this back to herself when he was suffering so vividly, and most of all frustrated that she was even a part of this dinner, that this was her life, when she’d worked so hard to be somewhere else entirely.
“I’m sorry,” Tomer said again. “I don’t know how to talk about it. Is that caesarstone?” he asked, eyeing the counters, and when her father said it was, Tomer nodded approvingly.
“But it’s so expensive,” her mother said.
“Yeah, but they’ll last forever,” Tomer said. “You can put pots right on the surface and they won’t leave a mark.”
“You really think they’re better than granite?” her father said, back in his emotional element.
“Five times as strong,” Tomer said. “I put them in every house I do. I’ve got some slabs at work, and some scraps of Moroccan tile that would look good along the backsplash. I can finish it for you in an afternoon, a day tops.”
“No kidding,” her father said.
“Not a problem,” Tomer said.
“Maybe Talia can help out,” her mother said. “Get some work experience.”
“I have a job,” Talia said, and when both her parents said “Journalism?” they laughed, as if she was five years old and had just announced that when she grew up she wanted to be a robot, or a dragon. Then they smiled at each other, as if pleased and surprised that thirty-plus years together could inspire them to blurt the same question in unison. Talia stood up, needing to be anywhere but in that kitchen. “It’s a joke,” her mother called after her, but Talia was already walking into her bedroom. She leaned against the wall and exhaled.
“Hey,” Gali said, from the floor. She was sprawled on the rug, texting on her phone.
“Your boyfriend?” Talia asked.
“Yeah.” Gali reddened. “I think so.”
“What’s his name?”
“Nir.” Her voice had a candied edge.
“He’s in your class?”
“In the army. On leave this week.” Then Gali flipped her phone shut. “My dad doesn’t know. Promise you won’t tell?” and when Talia nodded, Gali said, “I know it was weird showing up like this.”
“Why did you?”
Gali was quiet, as if searching for an honest answer. “I get so pissed at my dad,” she said, “and I just needed to be out of the apartment. To be somewhere else. And the idea of sitting around listening to records with you sounded—nice.”
Talia eyed the girl, making a sincerity check, then felt terrible for doing so when Gali seemed so vulnerable. She looked around her room, the place where she’d once made blanket forts and dressed up her stuffed animals. Draped over her closet door was a satiny wrap top, and she impulsively pulled it off. “This would look good on you,” she said. “Wear it out with Nir.”
“Seriously?”
“Try it on.”
“Then close your eyes,” Gali said, and Talia was touched that such a sassy girl could still be self-conscious. Talia hopped on the bed and put her face in a pillow, as if they were two girls goofing off at a slumber party, and when she opened her eyes,
Gali had the shirt on and Tomer was in the doorway.
“Your wish came true,” he said, and Gali grinned a little at her dad’s dorky joke. “Sorry to break up the party, ladies,” he said, “but it’s a school night.”
Outside, Talia waved to Gali as she climbed into the truck, and Tomer gathered her into a hug. “You saved me tonight. I don’t remember the last time I saw Gali smile—I forgot she had teeth,” he said. “Your family’s great, Talia. I don’t know what you’re complaining about.”
“Where’s your family?”
“Haifa,” he said. “And my brother’s in London. My parents were there for us after Efrat, of course, but after a couple months they went back to their lives. That’s how they are. They love me and Gali, but they’re not involved like—this.”
Tomer tightened his arms around her. “You make everything so easy,” he whispered. The automatic porch lights blinked on, catching the gloss in his hair, the stubble on his face. Talia felt a stab of longing and reflexively leaned into him, her cheek remembering just where to rest against his collarbone. She circled her arms around his waist, linking her fingers in his belt loops, before realizing what she was doing.
“Sorry,” she said, finding her voice lodged in her throat. “I just forgot for a minute.”
“You really think it’s for the best?”
She stared at him, suddenly knowing how dangerous it was, even standing this close. That was how people grew to be unhappy, she thought—by not making choices, by just letting what was warm and wonderful in one moment dictate the next, until one day they were living a life completely unsuited to their dreams. She took a big, stumbling step back.
“Okay,” Tomer said. “She thinks it’s for the best.” Then he said it again, as if forcing his own words on himself, and walked to the truck. The porch lights went off and Talia looked out in the distance. The wind picked up and she felt a creeping chill. She waited for a plane to interrupt the silence, or for her parents to come out, but she could see them moving inside the orange glow of the house. Everything around her was still. Then Tomer started the engine and steered down the driveway, and there was Gali at the window, face pressed to the glass, waving goodbye.
Part Five
After Tomer left, after she watched his truck grow smaller in the darkness until it was just two yellow taillights like the creepy eyes of a cat, Talia heard her parents on the phone with one of her sisters, on separate extensions, talking enthusiastically about Tomer. “We’re not together!” Talia said when they hung up, turning to her mother in the kitchen, then to her father down the hall, on the phone by the steps. “Anyway, can’t you see how unready he is?”
“He’s going through a rough time,” her father said stiffly, as if she’d insulted his friend, and her mother said that of course the age difference and the daughter situation and the timing in general weren’t ideal, but that he was obviously a good person. “I’m not saying it’s perfect, but if anything the whole thing shows he knows how to be in a relationship,” she said, and Talia stood baffled in the doorway: all this time, had her family seen her as more broken than she saw herself?
She marched into her room and flung herself on the bed. But wallowing was useless, she knew, so she opened her laptop and emailed all her former office mates from Kiev who had kept their jobs to remind them she was alive and still looking for work, and when she saw that one had immediately responded, she applauded herself for being so proactive. And when it turned out to be a vacation autoreply, she spent the next fifteen minutes obsessively refreshing her email. From there she Googled herself, her bureau chief, Ethan the blogger, who was still in Moscow, tweeting live from Putin’s address to the Duma. She sat there, feeling like the world’s youngest relic, and then pulled the blanket over her head, this ladybug comforter she’d had since elementary school.
She awoke, just before eleven, to her cell phone ringing.
“Talia? It’s Gali.”
Talia sat up. “Everything okay?”
“I’m fine. I’m with Dana at the movies. Would you let my dad know I’ll be staying at her house tonight?”
“Why don’t you tell him yourself?”
“He’s asleep.”
“Gali. We’re broken up.”
“Listen,” Gali said, “I texted him. But if he wakes up and wonders where I am, I don’t want him freaking out.”
“Fine,” Talia said, “I’ll let him know.” But after she hung up, she felt ashamed for surrendering so easily: if Tomer was this deep in the dark, didn’t someone need to make sure Gali was okay? She was certain she’d heard a boy’s voice in the background, and even if Gali was telling the truth, Talia doubted Tomer would want her staying at a friend’s house in the middle of the week. Plus it must have been an effort to find her number in the first place, as if Gali knew going through Talia was the easy route, that she was too big a pushover to say anything but yes. Most of all she felt manipulated, as if any bonding earlier that night had simply been a calculated act on Gali’s part to get what she wanted.
She called the number back. It rang and rang until voicemail picked up: This is Nir, you know what to do. She pressed redial and got the recording again, and finally, the third time, Nir answered.
“Let me talk to Gali,” she said.
“Who is this?”
“You know she’s fourteen.”
“And?”
“And give her the fucking phone!” Who was this guy, Talia thought, out with a little girl on a school night? She heard the muffled sound of a hand over the receiver, then Gali said, “Talia?”
“Tell me where you are.”
“I told you. At Dana’s.”
“Don’t lie to me.”
“But I told you,” Gali said.
“Gali, I won’t call your dad, but I just need to know where you went. Tell me right now or I’ll—”
“What?”
“I’ll tell him you’re a liar who’s sleeping with a much older boy, and that you’ve got pot stashed in your room.” Talia had no idea about the truth behind any of this, but Gali whispered, “Fine. We’re at Alma Beach,” and Talia pulled her parents’ spare keys off the peg near the door. “I’m taking the car,” she called out, and her mother yelled, “Tell him hi!”
She backed out of the driveway and sped through Rehovot’s silent roads. Even the highway was nearly empty, and within twenty-five minutes she was cruising