Shelly Oria - New York 1, Tel Aviv 0

Saturday comes, and Zoë and I go to see Keith Buckley read in Soho. It is April and Manhattan and this is what I think about the air: it is crisp. I keep thinking: Crisp. I fantasize about taking a big bite and chewing the air, making obscenely loud noises as if the air on this island were a gum, or worse: sunflower seeds. While I’m thinking this, Zoë is being beautiful. She says, I’m so happy it’s not cold anymore. She’s wearing the purple halter top that Ron bought her for our one-year anniversary; I got The Secrets of Mediterranean Cooking because Ron thinks that I should open my own restaurant instead of wasting my talent in somebody else’s kitchen. Zoë’s halter top ties behind her neck, except every few minutes it gets loose, and I need to tie it again for her. It’s too tight, she says every time, tugging on the knot.

At the bookstore, Zoë leads the way to her favorite spot, third row center. Keith isn’t here yet, she tells me without even looking around. How do you know? I ask, and she says, I need you to tie me up again, her eyes smiling, teasing. Then she asks, Has he ever read here before? I don’t think so, I say, but I get confused between all the stores sometimes. Zoë says, I’m having the worst déjà vu; I feel like this moment already happened. I want to say, maybe it did; I’ve always felt that the present is just one way of looking at things. But these are thoughts I keep to myself, because I can’t afford to lose Zoë. If I lose Zoë, Ron might go with her, and then I’d be completely alone in this city.

* * *

Zoë is the kind of person you lose easily: this has happened to many people. She’s also the kind of person who will freak out when someone suggests there is more than one reality, then blame that someone for her freak-out. Once, after a Keith Buckley reading in Midtown, we sat on a bench, our backs to Central Park. I had moved from Tel Aviv only a few months earlier; Zoë was explaining how the park had been created in the 1850s. The idea of having a designated area for greenery struck me as odd; Tel Aviv isn’t carefully planned like that — trees often choose their own location, and most streets stretch in unpredictable directions, creating a pattern of impulse.

We were waiting for Ron, and it was getting dark. Looking up and down, I noticed how this city, spreading to the sky, makes people smaller and faster. I was having one of my funny moods, when everything feels like a dream. I turned to Zoë and said, What if we’re not real? What if we’re just imagining this scene, right now, on this bench? Or what if somebody else is imagining us, and we are characters in this person’s hallucination? I didn’t know Zoë very well yet. I expected her to say I was crazy, or ask what the hell I was talking about. But she started shaking: first her knees, then her arms, then her entire body. She said, Don’t fuck with my mind like that. I didn’t know what to do. I put my hand on her knee and said, I’m here. Then I said, I’m real. She calmed down, but for the rest of the evening she kept saying, Don’t ever fuck with me like that.

So, if you want Zoë to like you, you need to: (1) be a flexible, spontaneous person, because Zoë hates to wait but also hates to plan in advance; (2) love all literary events where Keith Buckley is reading; and (3) learn never to fuck with her mind.

* * *

In Israel, this is what you do when you enter a bar, a movie theater, a mall: you open your bag. You let the security guard look through your personal belongings, until he decides you’re probably not carrying a bomb. The security guard is almost always a man. Sometimes he’ll be thorough, like he knows something you don’t; he might even use a metal detector that beeps if the interior of your jacket is explosive. But usually he’ll just tap the bottom of the bag and signal with his eyes Go in. If you’re a beautiful woman, you’re likely to hear some kind of comment that acknowledges your beauty. Then you’re free to roam whatever space it is, calm and confident, because in Tel Aviv, if you drink or eat or party enough, even the worst kind of war feels like peace.

When I first moved to New York, I kept opening my purse every time I entered a building, before realizing that there was no security guard. And every time I felt relieved, and every time I felt orphaned, and every time I felt surprised at both; there is a sense of comfort that you get when someone else is in charge of your safety, and I didn’t yet know that in America danger is something you can choose to ignore.

Back then, I was subletting a tiny studio in Hell’s Kitchen that had only one window. The building had a live-in super with a thick Romanian accent who treated me like his protégée because he was the Veteran Immigrant. My first day in the building, he said, Twelve years I live here now; it is like home. His accent was so thick that it took a few seconds of tossing the sounds in my brain to decipher their message, but I felt comforted. Then, three weeks later, he came over and said, New mall only few blocks from here; very expensive but you should go, look in the windows. I said I would, and I did. At the new Time Warner Center, I was going in as Ron was coming out. I reached to open my purse, and saw him smile, his Israeli radar letting me know I was busted. He seemed familiar, and happy; I stopped. We spent ten minutes trying to figure out where we knew each other from. The army? No, he left before he was eighteen, never served; the Peace Now rally in D.C.? No, I knew nothing about it; after a while, we gave up.

* * *

Zoë wants to step outside to smoke. We leave our coats and grab our bags. There is intimacy between us and a wide-shouldered guy with dreadlocks as we are squeezing our way out. Dreadlocks looks up at Zoë’s shirt and Zoë says, Keep an eye on our stuff, okay? as if this is our friend and that’s the least he can do. Dreadlocks nods; I can see inside his mind, very briefly, and it is full of one word: boobs.

Outside on Crosby Street, optimistic people believe that seats for this event are in abundance, so they just stand there, smoking or chatting. Zoë bums a cigarette from a pale baby-faced guy who looks familiar. I hear her say, No you don’t get my number in return, and then a second later, You get … my gratitude, and then laughter. They are equidistant from me, but she is louder and I hear only her. Zoë never has cigarettes because she’s quit smoking, so she always has to bum from people who haven’t quit smoking yet. These people are usually around, though, and always into helping Zoë, so there’s no reason to change the MO. Unless you count Ron as a reason; every time he smells cigarettes on Zoë’s breath he squints and says, You need to commit to your health, Zoë, not just talk about it.

* * *

In Tel Aviv, walking into a bar is like stepping into a cloud. If you spend more than an hour inside the cloud, scent molecules get under your hair and skin, and they often take their time getting out. When you get back from the bar, if you don’t want to inhale smoke from the pillow in your sleep, you head straight to the shower and turn the faucet all the way to red until the small room fills with steam. When I’m in Tel Aviv, I usually think, No big deal; then I get back to New York and feel indebted to the non-yellow walls, the guarantee of nicotine-free air once you walk into a room. It is true that in New York when you wash your clothes the water turns gray; you scrub, and inside the bubbles you see soot. But I don’t mind it; I know that this urban dirt is the side effect of speed and productivity. I think: New York 1, Tel Aviv 0. It’s an ongoing competition, a game that Ron and I invented, but I forget to keep track, so I have to start counting all over again every time.