The UnAmericans: Stories (21 page)

“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—”