The UnAmericans: Stories (31 page)

There was a night not long after that visit, a completely simple and uneventful night, when they had a fire going and were eating dinner on the couch with a movie on, and he’d had a feeling of being utterly sated, as if everything he needed in life existed right there. He’d pulled Mira close and kissed the soft spot between her eyes and whispered that he loved her, and she’d whispered that she loved him too. “No,” she’d said. “It seems like such a bullshit thing to say! How can I when I also love this pasta, this movie, this fire? We need a different word,” she said. “We need to exhume Ben Yehuda from his grave and ask for an approximation of what this is—this love.” And then she took his hand and squeezed so hard his knuckles popped.

Looking back, he wished he could zero in on the moment things started to falter, the moment he should have suspected Eric was lurking on the sidelines. But it was impossible. Even her recent bad moods were the ones she’d cycled through the entire time he’d known her, always coming at the end of a project when she was stressed about what to do next, saying she was so far removed from being swept up in a translation that she couldn’t even remember how it felt. Boaz would wander into her office upstairs and find her impatiently watching the view from her window; the sun couldn’t set fast enough.

Even a couple weeks ago, when Mira announced that she couldn’t take the silence anymore, that they must have been insane for isolating themselves up there, away from the world, there in the Home of the Lonely—even that hadn’t felt alarming. She always made some similar proclamation when her work wasn’t going well, as if the very quiet she’d once craved became a taunting little monster when the open hours of a day loomed. And so Boaz did what he always did when she got anxious: he packed up the car and they drove down to her parents’ house in Boston. He loved pulling onto their wide street, with its Craftsmans and Victorians and enormous leafy trees, he loved walking inside with his own key and dropping his bags on the floor, his coat on the banister, as comfortable as one of Wendy and Larry’s own. He loved the house, creaky and bright and always messy, as if Wendy were still rebelling against her upbringing of white carpets and polished silverware, her walls not covered with famous paintings but childhood craft projects, every single thing her daughters and granddaughters had papier-mâchéd and glitter-glued in the art shed of Camp Haverim over the years. The art was terrible, but Boaz loved it. He loved it all. He loved the pencil markings on the pantry door, measuring Mira and Hannah’s growth as girls, loved the hodgepodge of family photos cluttering the mantel, the endless parade of sweet and dopey dogs. He loved arriving in the middle of the day, when Wendy and Larry were still at work, and napping on the beanbag chair in the basement, surrounded by relics of the Kaplan home, the unused exercise equipment and water-warped Beta tapes and boxes of toys Hannah’s girls had tired of but which were waiting for their kid, his and Mira’s, even labeled that way,
for M+B
. He slept so peacefully those afternoons, the sound of Mira upstairs on the phone with her sister, a neighbor’s lawn mower in the distance, the front door opening and Wendy and Larry greeting their daughter, then asking, “Where’s Boaz?”—two words as beautiful to him as a song.

“M
IRA
,” R
ONI
was saying now, as they snaked up the highway toward Jerusalem. “Okay, I remember her, maybe from the Bronfman dinner? Tall with black hair, looked a lot like Eva?”

Boaz nodded miserably and Roni said, “It’s a shame she’s not here. She couldn’t get off work?”

“She left me,” Boaz mumbled. “The question is why I’m here. Eva’s
her
grandmother.”

Roni stared. She opened her mouth, then closed it. And Boaz, who had never overshared in his life, who had no idea where that outburst came from and didn’t trust what was coming next, cracked the window and looked out toward Mevasseret, at the skinny trees and sun-beaten hills and distant houses blurring past.

She let go of her BlackBerry and slipped it in her purse. It was the first time he’d seen it out of her hand; and gadgetless, Roni looked different, gentler: not just a museum bigwig but a wife, a mother, maybe still someone’s daughter. She touched his arm and said, “Tell me what’s happening.” And maybe because he was back in a country where strangers found it perfectly acceptable to inquire into other people’s personal lives, maybe because he sensed all the doors that had been swinging open the past decade could close in on him at any minute, and maybe most of all because he understood that, while in a normal situation Roni wouldn’t even nod to him on the street, the fact that he represented the foundation obligated her to care about his problems, Boaz did something he never would have imagined he was capable of: he turned to this woman he didn’t know at all and started to talk. He told her things he hadn’t told anyone, not even Wendy and Larry. He said he hadn’t even known Mira was unhappy. That when she didn’t come home from work the Monday before last, it never occurred to him she was leaving; all he could think to do was obsessively refresh the local news online for traffic accidents. He hadn’t even been aware of Eric. Of course he’d known she’d gone to Albany for a campus visit that fall, a trip on which he’d declined to accompany her, not wanting to waste days in a sterile motel room while she gave craft talks, particularly because she wasn’t even interested in the position; she simply thought being offered the job would give her more leverage at the college where she already worked. And when it turned out to be an inside hire, the entire thing had seemed to Boaz a nothing story, a trip that didn’t even merit an anecdote.

Then that Monday evening, Mira finally called him, supposedly from her colleague Sharon’s house in Hardwick. She was crying when she told Boaz about Eric, a guy who ran a restaurant in Albany where she’d stopped for a drink during that long and exhausting campus visit, a guy she’d been emailing ever since. Nothing romantic at first, not even flirtatious. But then they were writing every week, then every day, these long and detailed emails that felt more like letters, all about their families and work and even their childhoods, getting to know each other with such a focused intimacy she’d forgotten was possible. They’d never done anything, Mira promised, not even kissed, and the whole thing had felt so Victorian in its prudishness, though she couldn’t deny she’d fantasized about sleeping with him—how could she not, having been with Boaz for so long that she could predict every one of his moves, their sex life more like a race to see who came first. But the whole thing with Eric had seemed so manageable, so predictable, the kind of situation many married people invariably found themselves in, because after a decade together it was hard to feel as thrilled as you did in the very beginning, and she’d told herself she had nothing to feel guilty about because all the situation had amounted to was a pile of emails.

But then she started to call him once Boaz had gone to bed, crossing the yard and climbing onto the rock where they got cell service. She started to feel as though Eric was on her mind all the time and everything she did, even the runs she took in the woods behind their house up to Fox Ridge—suddenly she found herself narrating all of it to Eric, as if these things could only be meaningful if she imagined him experiencing them with her. So they started to meet in Brattleboro, halfway between their houses, just for the day. Eric would plan these elaborate outings. He had two young children from his previous marriage, and she wasn’t sure if he’d been this way before fatherhood, but he saw every afternoon as a potential adventure. He was the kind of person, she said, who’d hear about a good diner thirty miles away and make a whole day of it, the kind of person who loved thinking about new things Mira might want to do and see that she hadn’t even considered. But those afternoons hadn’t seemed worth mentioning, because when she’d told Boaz she was meeting up with some of her colleagues and he’d nodded from his desk and told her to have fun, it really had felt as though she wasn’t doing anything technically wrong. The whole thing had felt so textbook, looking for one more exciting distraction before she began the steady gray march into adulthood, and if she was really going to be honest, this entire crush was a big part of the reason she had finally decided to get pregnant—she’d convinced herself that maybe a baby could instantly bring her closer to Boaz and farther from Eric, cutting off these terrifying new feelings before they even had legs to stand on.

And so, that past week when Eric picked her up from the train station in Brattleboro, she opened her mouth to tell him she was pregnant, and that whatever it was they were doing, however harmless, had to stop. But instead she had blurted, it had honestly just rolled off her tongue, that she loved him. And Eric had pulled to the side of the road, cut the ignition and said he’d loved her from that first night she walked into his restaurant and that he wanted to make a go of things, that nothing in his life had ever made more sense, and that was when the entire room went blurry for Boaz and he hung up the phone, ran to the bathroom and threw up.

“So they didn’t sleep together,” Roni said.

Boaz stared at her. “So?”

“So you know the baby’s yours.”

“Of course.”

“I don’t understand what the problem is,” Roni said. “You’re having a child together. She’ll get this man out of her system and come back to you.”

“I’d rather she slept with him than fell in love.”

An image was coming into Boaz’s mind, a photo of Mira from that campus visit to Albany he’d found her looking at one night on her laptop. It was a simple picture, her on a bench somewhere in town. But she looked happier than he’d seen her in years, shielding her eyes from the sun and smiling wide, so he’d asked to make it his screensaver, and it was only now occurring to him who had been holding the camera.

“What did you say?” Roni said.

“When?”

“After you vomited and she called you back. I’ve known you forty minutes and already I’d bet one of Eva’s Litnikovs that you picked up on the first ring.”

“Fine,” Boaz said. “I told her I felt betrayed. I told her one of the things I loved most about being married was that I felt safe with her, and I didn’t think I ever could anymore.”

Roni shook her head, sadly. “Boaz,” she said. “You tell her you felt safe, and all she hears is that her husband sees the world as dangerous.”

Boaz didn’t know what to say. He stared out the window and wondered when Jerusalem had gotten so dirty. Garbage everywhere, crumbling houses, cats darting out of trash bins—so many they must have outnumbered humans on the street. The few people outside this early all seemed so gloomy, propped against the bus depot or walking past in a hurried sleepwalk, a group of Filipino women looking as if they’d been up for hours, pushing the very young and the very old down the sidewalk. Even the sky seemed depleted, as if it wished the day would just end already. But then the driver turned off Keren HaYesod onto a side street, and Boaz caught sight of two boys kicking a soccer ball. They were young, six or seven, in t-shirts and shorts but moving too fast to feel the wind that had picked up. They were running and laughing and when one of their mothers yelled something from a window, they laughed some more. Those kids could have been anywhere—Vermont, Boston, Kiryat Gat, probably a million places Boaz had never been—and what struck him was how touchingly naïve they seemed, as if they couldn’t imagine anything that could make them happier than what they were doing right then, in that glorious moment. Suddenly Boaz was overcome by it too, a complete and spontaneous happiness. All at once it felt so simple to let go of his problems for just a minute and feel grateful to be a part of something as big and basic as that morning, that city, that street. He felt a lightness inside him, opening wider and wider as they drove through the hills up to Eva’s house, and then he climbed the steps, unlocked the door and found Mira inside, waiting on the floor of her grandmother’s empty living room.

S
HE
’
D GOTTEN
in last night, she said. Her parents had told her he was coming and she couldn’t stand the idea of him doing this alone. “I can’t stand any of it,” she said. “All I’ve been doing is feeling miserable, then feeling worse for even
allowing
myself to be sad.”