The UnAmericans: Stories (32 page)

She stood up and reached for his arm. But she caught the sleeve of his shirt instead. Boaz hadn’t realized he was backing away until he was up against the front door. He heard the bleats of traffic outside, saw the scratches on the wall where Eva’s mail table had once been. Most of her furniture had already been sold, and the room was filled with ghostly outlines where the walls had darkened and aged around those wood tables and heavy tweed sofas. He had an eerie, immediate feeling of remembering just where things had been, the stacks of magazines covering the shiny white mail table and the large vase that always, always held fresh-cut flowers, and beside that, the ceramic umbrella stand Eva had brought back from Marrakesh—

“Boaz?”

He blinked, and everything came horribly into focus. It was almost unbearable to look at her. Her sweater was rumpled, her hair a tangled nest, and he thought about her thinking about
him
all night, too nervous and keyed-up to check her reflection. He knew he should feel sorry for her, this mess of a Mira. But everything, even the very fact that her matted hair suggested she’d just woken up, made him angry—he’d barely slept at all the past ten days, too afraid of what he’d dream. It didn’t even make sense that he was seeing her. Her absence had felt bolder and more intrusive than she’d ever been in person, as if it had taken on the heft of a dozen women, and now there she was, just standing there, so casually alive.

“What,” he said, finding his voice at the last possible moment, “are you doing here?”

“I’m physically sick about this.”

“What does your boyfriend say about you using up our savings to fly here?”

“He’s not my boyfriend.”

“You promise you weren’t with him this week?”

“I told you, I was with Sharon. You have to believe me.”

“But you told me you loved him.”

“I do.” She looked so tiny in that enormous room. She still wasn’t showing; if anything, she seemed as gawky and nervous as a teenager, biting her lip and stretching her sweater sleeves over her hands. “I can’t tell you how much I wish this wasn’t happening,” she said. “But it’s the truth. I love you in one way, him in another. I’m sorry. I can’t stand here and lie to you of all people, and say that Eric means nothing to me.”

“Do you understand how ridiculous you sound? Like someone we’d hate.”

She winced, as if she’d been slapped. “You know what? I
want
you to hate me.”

He was still backed against the door, as if it were the only way to protect himself, seeing her from this singular angle, like a sniper. All around him, the bare walls were dirty and gray and riddled with nail holes, and it struck him how depressing it was that Eva and Sy had transformed this empty space into such an interesting and beautiful life, and now a realtor was going to lead a new couple inside and apologize for those holes and then some workman would come and in twenty minutes all of it, the entire history of that room, would be spackled over.

“You don’t understand,” Mira said, “what it’s like to be with someone who exists so fully in his head. Who has no desire to leave our weird little cocoon. And then Eric would put all this effort into thinking about what would make me happy. He’d have plans for us. We’d go to lunch. We’d go on hikes.”

“We go on hikes.”

“No, Boaz, we’d go on walks outside our house. We’d walk to think, then go back to our offices to think some more. Sometimes I’d feel like we weren’t even really living together. It was like we were swimming in the same pool, but I was never allowed in your lane.”

“I thought that was part of the deal,” he said quietly. “You said it was. That with you I was
allowed
to disappear.”

“Right outside your office window,” she said, “you can see all our patio furniture knocked on its side, and there’s bird shit all over it. Like, it’s really covered in shit. And I’d look out your window and wonder what kind of person could see that every day and not just go hose it off.”

The entire time they’d been speaking Hebrew, but then something inside her seemed to rupture and Mira blurted, in English, “But I could never be upset about that—about anything—because you’ve convinced yourself I have no real reasons to be sad. That your pain will always trump mine. It’s this fucked-up game you’ve been playing since we met.”

“But I love you,” he said, a little helplessly.

She took a long breath and let it out slowly, as if thinking hard about what she was going to say next. “Being in love with my family isn’t the same as loving me.”

“That’s bullshit,” he said. But he knew he was lying. Of course he couldn’t separate that love. All at once he saw so clearly what would follow. Not just that night, or the long flight back to the States, but beyond. Winter, spring, the baby. Her family would call incessantly to check in on him, they’d probably even take his side, but after a while they’d learn to embrace Eric because there was no other choice: Mira loved him and she was blood. And Eric would be so infuriatingly gracious about the whole thing, he’d probably invite Boaz down to Albany for dinner, and Boaz would have to sit across the table from the two of them, over some elaborate meal Eric had prepared with herbs and vegetables from his own fucking garden, and beer he’d brewed himself. More images started popping up that Boaz couldn’t block. Holidays, when he’d have to make that drive he knew by heart, down to Wendy and Larry’s to pick up his kid. He’d have to park on the street and walk up their steps, and rather than going right inside he’d have to stand there, wiping his feet on the mat, listening to all their voices through the door until someone heard the bell and let him in.

“You understand this Eric thing is your fault, too,” Mira said. “Of course I fell for someone who knows how to be close to me. That’s what you do in relationships, Boaz—you try to see the world through the other person’s eyes. I mean, look at my parents, my grandparents—they’re like these model couples. Maybe what’s difficult . . .”

She didn’t finish. But the sentiment existed now, there in the room: Boaz didn’t have a model, and maybe that was the problem. He’d always believed one of the most terrifying things about intimacy was another person knowing your darkest insecurities and being able to use them against you in your weakest moments, an emotional sucker punch. He realized now how wrong that was—it was much more excruciating for someone to know these things and choose not to say them, as if that person was the only one who understood just how crushing the truth could be.

He walked across the room, right past her, out to the terrace. Even that perfect view of the Old City he’d once admired suddenly looked crass and artificial, and he turned away. Mira came up behind him. “But despite all of this, I really do love you,” she said. “And I know we’re supposed to be together. That’s why I flew out here—it’s all I want. To have a family and grow old with you and to one day look back on this whole time as nothing but a selfish blip in my thirties.”

“And Eric?”

“I’m willing to never talk to him again if you promise me things will be different. That I’ll get all of you this time. That you’ll stop keeping some big part of yourself stashed away.”

She wrapped her arms around his chest. He smelled her sweat and lotion and hair, this apple shampoo that had always seemed sickeningly sweet to him, but which now made him so nostalgic he wanted to cry. The truth was, Boaz couldn’t visualize what exactly it was she needed from him, he couldn’t even describe it, but maybe all that mattered was that he’d never wanted anything more in his life than to give it to her. “Just say you’ll try,” she whispered, and then she stepped forward and touched his face and pulled the “yes” right out of him.

I
T WAS
impossible to forget Mira’s comment about sex with him being a race, so Boaz tried to ignore all the shortcuts—but he honestly didn’t need to. Naked, Mira
was
starting to show and her entire body felt different, not just her stomach but her hips and arms, and afterward they lay in the guest room and talked. Mira said she’d been reading up on what was happening with the baby, that it was still the size of a blueberry but that hands and feet were starting to form, though in the book illustrations they looked more like weird little paddles. She said she was lucky that so far she’d been spared morning sickness but that she couldn’t stop peeing, it was this annoying, ever-constant thing, and then she looked around the empty room and reminisced about staying there as a girl. And maybe because Eva was gone, or maybe because she felt as giddy as Boaz, this time Mira’s stories were happy: the Russian political cartoonist who did sketches of her and Hannah, the pancakes Grandpa Sy made when she was homesick, the nights her grandmother let her try on her perfume and beaded handbags as she dressed for a function.

It was 10
A.M.
and Boaz could hear people moving around down below on Hovevei Tzion Street, but he had no desire to join them. He wanted to stay in this room the rest of the trip, just him and Mira. But he also wanted to do things right this time, wanted to be the kind of guy who’d listened to everything she’d said and would make her happy now, a guy who’d made plans in between all the foundation meetings, who would take her tonight to that restaurant inside the shuk she’d loved their last trip here, the one he’d complained was cramped and kitschy and pretentious, but he’d enjoy his meal this time and not make a dig about the prices, and then they’d walk through the city and stop somewhere for a seltzer for her and a beer for him, they’d sit up at the bar together and he’d hold her hand, her leg, never, never giving her a reason to swivel away from him again.

Only his cell phone wouldn’t stop ringing. The director of the absorption center wanted to know how his flight was, the broker asked if she could stop by in the afternoon, the man at Eden Storage said they were closing early today so the sooner Boaz came, the better.

The day was still gray, but even the exact sidewalks and buildings he’d seen hours before seemed brighter with Mira by his side, as if the entire city had been sandblasted while they’d been indoors. Even the fact that he had to spend the morning sorting through Eva’s castoffs, the task he’d dreaded most—it reminded him too much of doing the same for his mother—seemed less depressing with Mira’s hand in his pocket, her head on his shoulder as she led him down Jabotinsky Street and across Emek Refaim to Eden Storage, introducing herself to the owner in that Hebrew so technically perfect she always gave herself away as a foreigner.

“I’m so sorry,” the man said. He had a kind face, with a wide smile and a head round as a basketball. “Your grandmother really was one of the good ones.”

“You knew her that well?” Mira said.

“She was here all the time.” The man sorted through his enormous chunk of keys and led them outside to the row of sheds. “Once, twice a week.”

“For how long?”

“My wife and I have been here forty years. So that at least.”

“To visit her storage facility?” Mira rolled her eyes, as if this guy were just another crazy in the capital of crazies.

Then she pushed up the door of the shed and gasped. The sound was so dramatic, so unlike anything he’d ever heard from Mira, that when Boaz walked inside, he expected to find a dead animal, decaying under the boxes.

But there were no animals, no furniture, not even any boxes. Just paintings. Covering all four walls up to the ceiling, at least fifty in total. All of them, every single portrait, of Eva. And all, Boaz saw as he looked closer, bearing the signature of Mikhail Borovsky in the right-hand corner.

There was Eva when she was young, pink-cheeked and grinning with a green scarf knotted at her neck, titled, simply,
Paris
. There was Eva more than twenty years later, in a series of almost forty paintings, all titled
Moscow
. Those led up to the
Jerusalem
series as Eva progressively aged, the last one looking so recent Boaz guessed it was the final portrait Borovsky had done before he’d died. And in almost every one, Eva was staring straight at the artist with the widest, most radiant smile.

Mira took a deep breath. “She came here all the time?”

The man nodded, and Mira continued, “Always by herself?”

“Yes.”

“She never brought—her husband?”

The man glanced at Boaz, then at the floor. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I . . . I didn’t know.”

Mira looked up at the ceiling and started to cry. The man awkwardly tapped her shoulder, as if all of this were his fault. He stepped out of the shed, kicked gravel around.

Boaz knew his only job right then was to comfort Mira. It was the husbandly thing to do, the right thing, the only thing. To kiss her cheek and whisper that painful as this was, none of it mattered anymore. They were all dead now, Eva and Sy and Mikhail and his wife—all of it was moot. And if she really thought about it, maybe Eva and Mikhail had been smart to keep this a secret. There was no denying she’d loved Sy, there was no denying they’d had a beautiful marriage, and who knew, if things had worked out differently, Mira may never have been born.

But every one of those words felt like a lie. How, Boaz wondered, could Stalin ever have believed realism was the safer solution? He would have done anything to be surrounded by surrealist pieces he didn’t understand, paintings he could stare at for hours, puzzling over myriad meanings, because looking at those portraits, there was only one possible message.