Every House Needs a Balcony (24 page)

When her husband walked into the apartment, she gave him two sharp slaps to his face. He didn't know what had hit him. “These are for your lies,” she told him, and added, “I detest liars. Oh, and best regards from Zvika. He told me that it's been three years since he last saw you.”

He was silent.

“So it's high time you told me who you've been swinging around with these last few months. But before you do so, you can feed your daughter and put her to bed. In the meantime, I'm going out to breathe some fresh air. It's suffocating in here, with all those lies filling up every inch of space.”

She slammed out of the apartment and returned two hours later.

“Would you like some coffee?” he asked her.

“I want nothing from you except the truth,” she replied.

“Well, it's true, I have been having an affair, with someone from work.”

“Is it Tova?” she asked.

“Why would it be Tova?” he replied. “No, it's someone who started working with us six months ago.”

“What's her name, this someone?” she asked.

“Adi,” he answered her.

“And how long has this affair been going on?”

“Three months.” He sat down heavily opposite her, and his hands shook.

“Why are you shaking?” she hissed. “I'm the one who should be shaking.” And then she noticed that she was shaking all over, not just in her hands.

“Because I don't want to lose you,” he told her.

They sat opposite each other at their dining table that opened to the living room. He was afraid of her, and she was afraid of what she was about to hear.

“So every morning when you left early for work?”

“I picked her up to take her to work.”

“And evenings, did you even work in the second office?” She needed to know everything.

“Of course I did,” he said.

“Until what time?” she asked.

“Until seven o'clock usually,” he replied.

“And every day, every day at seven o'clock you went back with her to her place and stayed until half past ten at night?” she asked.

“Yes,” he admitted.

“Every evening?” She insisted on knowing. “You couldn't spend even a couple of evenings a week with us?”

“I loved her,” he said. “I wanted to be with her.”

“So you loved her.” She was inflamed. “So it wasn't just a fleeting fuck for you.”

He said nothing.

“Do you love her?”

“Yes,” he said, and added immediately that he loved her too.

“I spend my days at the hospital, and every morning off you go to pick up your girlfriend so she shouldn't—God forbid—have to take the bus to work.” She desperately needed to prove to him what a bastard he was.

“I always left you the car when you had to go to the hospital.” He tried to prove to her that at least in this respect he was considerate of their needs.

“What do you want to do?” he asked.

“First thing I want is for you to get out of my sight. I don't want to see you here anymore.”

“Do you want me to leave?” he asked, his voice trembling.

“I can't stand the sight of you,” she said and urged him to leave so she could slam the door after him. Shaking all over, she remembered that movie she saw, when the police came to arrest them in that oasis that looked like something out of paradise, and time after time after time after time the girl saw the hotel explode into tiny pieces. That's
what she felt like, that her life had exploded into tiny pieces.

Even when she suspected him of having an affair, she had never thought of it in terms of love. The moment he admitted to her that he was in love with that Adi of his, she felt cut to the core, as if her life had fallen apart.

He called two hours later to ask if he could come home, and she said he couldn't.

“Would you like me to come back in the evening?” he asked.

“Don't you want to go to that Adi of yours? That one you're so in love with?”

“I want to come home,” he said.

“You can come home only after you tell me that you're through with her,” she replied.

“So can I come home now?” he asked.

“Why, are you finished with her?”

“Yes,” he replied.

“So come back in the evening,” she said to him.

When he came home in the evening, she asked him what he wanted to do, and he said he didn't know. He was too confused to think what was best for him.

“Maybe we should have a trial separation,” she said, and he agreed.

“Tomorrow I'll look for somewhere to live,” he said.

All night they heard each other twisting, each alone in bed, she with her humiliation and he with his confusion.
She felt all alone in the world, that there was no one there for her, and each time she closed her eyes, she saw the hotel exploding into tiny pieces that can never be put together.

In the afternoon, he called her from work and told her that he'd found a room in an apartment owned by some old woman and that he'd come by later to pick up some of his things.

By the time she'd hung up she was so agitated that she called up his work and asked for Adi. “Just a moment,” said the secretary, and someone picked up the phone. “Hello.”

“Is this Adi?” she asked.

“Yes,” Adi replied.

“Are you the same Adi that's been fucking my husband?” she asked.

There was silence on the other end of the line.

“I'm asking because I want to make sure I'm talking to the right Adi,” she said, and added, “Just in case there's more than one Adi in your office.”

“There's only one,” Adi replied.

“So you just get your filthy hands off my husband, you fucking little whore,” she said, and slammed down the receiver.

In the evening when he came to collect his things, she didn't speak to him, and didn't even reply when he asked when he could come to be with Noa.

When she arrived at the bank the following day, she said to Kobi, one of her regular clients who was always sniffing around her, that she didn't feel up to staying at work today.

“So come away with me,” he suggested immediately.

“Where to?” she asked.

“I need to fly to Eilat to oversee my workers, who are laying wall-to-wall carpeting on an entire floor of the King Solomon Hotel,” he said. “Would you like to come?”

“Why not?” she said, and went to her boss and told him she couldn't face working today because she'd just learned that her husband was having an affair with another woman.

“You've only just found out?” he asked nosily.

“Day before yesterday,” she said and went out, with Kobi right behind her. Within two hours they had taken over an entire floor of the King Solomon Hotel, and for the first time in seven years she had sex with another man who knew what women want and made her feel like one.

Only when she returned from Eilat did she phone her sister to tell her that her husband had left home.

“How dare he do this to me?” she asked her sister, who said that maybe he was getting elsewhere what he was missing at home.

“The worst of it all is that he lied to me,” she said to her sister. “It's so humiliating to be lied to.” Her sister asked if that really was the thing that hurt her the most.

“Yes, what do you mean?”

“I don't know what I mean. I am only saying that you should do some genuine emotional stocktaking with regard to what you want of yourself, of your life.”

All night she thought over what her sister had said, and
came to the conclusion that she'd been lying to herself, and her greatest pain was caused by the fact that he had stopped loving her. And then she asked herself if she still loved him at all.

“Let's go for counseling,” she suggested two weeks later, when he came to be with Noa. He looked very sad, and her heart ached to see him so. She wanted to ask him if he was eating well, but of course she didn't. He agreed immediately, and they went to a highly recommended marriage guidance counselor, to whom she poured her heart out about his infidelity and the fact that when she was taking her daughter to the hospital, he was spending time with his mistress.

“I can never forgive him for that,” she told the counselor.

The counselor told them that since couples usually go for counseling at the very last minute, in most cases she was unable to repair crises that had lasted for years.

The counselor asked him if he was still meeting the other woman, and he said he wasn't.

But she said that even if they were no longer together, they were still meeting every day at work, and it was driving her crazy.

“Can't you give up that job?” the counselor asked him.

“Absolutely not. Not after I've finally managed to find a job that I feel will advance me professionally. I don't want to leave this office.”

“So maybe you can tell her to leave?” she hissed. “She's single, isn't she? She doesn't have a family to support. Tell her to leave,” she said to her husband.

“I can't do that,” he said.

“Why not?” asked the counselor. “It's quite obvious that the fact of your still meeting her every day at work doesn't help the way your wife feels.”

“I can see that,” he said, “but still, I can't ask her to leave her job because my wife is bothered by her being with me in the same office.”

“So you leave, if you are unable to tell her!” she screamed at him in front of the counselor, who told her that she wasn't even trying to see his point of view but was obsessed with proving how wrong he was, compared with her. “You have to understand the underlying problem,” she told her, and she replied that the underlying problem was that he was in love with another woman.

“That counselor gets on my nerves,” she told him when they went out. “I'm not going back to her.” He refused to talk to his Adi about leaving her job, and she called his sister to ask her to try to persuade him to leave his job. She grasped at this as if her entire marriage depended only on whether he met his ex-girlfriend in the office they both worked in. His sister told her that she couldn't dictate to her brother what to do with his life.

When his father told her that as a woman she should be fighting for her man, she felt she had been struck by a bolt of lightning. Did she really want to fight for him at all? After all, she'd used up all the strength she had on her struggle for Noa. She started imagining how her life would look with
out him, and although she still saw the hotel exploding into tiny pieces like in the movie, she asked herself if it wouldn't be easier to build a new hotel than to try to rehabilitate the ruins of the old one that were spread all over town.

She went through the next three months in a daze, wandering from one friend to another, telling them all about the breakdown of her marriage, hoping they would rebuke him for his behavior. But most of her friends said they'd always seen him as an affectionate, loving husband, and things like that happen all the time and there are always temptations in work situations and you don't get divorced because of an infidelity, and even if she said it wasn't only sex but love, they said they were sure he was in love with her; didn't he bring her flowers every Friday?

She felt as if the whole world was against her, and even her mother, when she tried talking to her, to get some emotional support from her, told her that she was naive if she thought she'd find anything better than him, and with all of Noa's problems, she couldn't afford to even think that she'd ever find a better father for her daughter.

“But he doesn't love me,” she tried to tell her mother, who immediately dismissed the whole thing. She knew that the three months she had allocated them to decide what they wanted to do about their marriage were fast running out, and she was still trying to get everyone she knew to agree that he was a shit. But wherever she turned, people were telling her she should forgive him and that you don't throw
out a husband after seven years of marriage because of one time he's played away from home.

One day she saw Noa dancing in her room, as if she was putting all her heart and soul in her dance, as if she was floating on air, looking into herself and inventing a whole new world all her own, and her heart ached at the thought that, from the moment of her birth, life had never smiled on Noa, and now that she was four years old, her father had left home—perhaps forever, perhaps for an indefinite time—and her mother was going around like a weapon of mass destruction with anger attacks she couldn't control.

One afternoon they were on their way to the Institute of Child Development when they almost collided with a car coming out of a side street without giving her the right-of-way. She pushed down hard on the brakes, looked at the backseat to make sure that Noa was safely belted into her child seat, stopped the car in the middle of the road, got out, and walked over to the murderous driver who could have killed her daughter and gave her two loud slaps across the face before returning to her car and driving off, so as not to be late for her appointment.

A week later, when her husband came home to be with Noa, she went out to take care of some chores and wanted to park in the Ramat Aviv commercial center parking lot just as some slimy yuppie with the elaborate grammar of a schoolteacher—just her type—shouted at her that she had almost driven into his car. “Why almost?” she asked
and backed up, then drove straight into him. This time she managed to knock a dent not only in his fender but in her own monthly salary as well. She thought it could have been worse, and that she and Noa could eat at her sister's for the rest of the month, which would please her sister.

But after the incident in the playground, she knew she had lost it completely.

They went to the playground near their home, and when she wanted to sit Noa on the merry-go-round next to a kid her age, the kid's mother, who herself looked like a Ms. Potato Head, came running up and snatched him off, looking sideways at Noa, whose face was swollen from the steroids she had to take to stabilize her hemoglobin.