Edeet Ravel: Look for Me

“Dana. The bride is my cousin. I guess she’s not a bride anymore. I guess she’s a wife now.”

“Dana. Wel , Dana, what are we going to do? Encourage you to be derelict, or urge you to do your duty?”

“You don’t have other plans?” I asked again. After my despairing vision of the at and the girlfriend (black hair, sensuous mouth, aloof but generous), his availability seemed too good to be true.

“Not at the moment.”

“Don’t pay any at ention to my uniform. I only wore it because I don’t have a dress.”

“I guess I’m too weak to resist.”

“I’l wait until you finish packing up.”

“That’s okay, Gabriel and Alex wil look after everything. Let’s go, my car’s just down the block.” He waved to his two friends.

I nished recording my dream and drank two cups of café et lait, a co ee drink Daniel had invented and named. The kitchen had a name too, the Dining Car, because of its narrow oblong shape and its position at the end of the U, between the living room on one side and the bedroom and bathroom on the other. The at had original y been three separate units on the ground oor of the building. There wasn’t enough space in this middle section for a table and chairs; instead, Daniel had built a counter along the wal , bought two wooden stools, and hired an artist friend from work to paint a mural on the wal above the counter. The mural showed two train windows, through which appeared a comical landscape of cows and barns. I loved the painting, and I loved the kitchen. But in fact we rarely ate at the counter. Daniel preferred to eat Japanese-style, kneeling at the low table in the living room.

I nished my café et lait and had a shower. Showering at our place was a particularly pleasant experience because the bathroom Daniel had built for us was very luxurious. We sacri ced space in the bedroom in order to have a large bathroom, but Daniel said he was tired of the closet model he’d grown up with, and he brought al his creativity to bear on this project. The room was tranquil and luminous, like the crystal oor the Queen of Sheba mistook for a pool in King Solomon’s palace, but it was also warm, with a white clawfoot tub, a cushioned window seat, and multicolored ceramic oor tiles. Some of the tiles had come loose and I kept them in a pile by the sink. Whenever my neighbor Benny came to visit he’d glance at the tower of tiles, stacked snugly at the corner of the counter, next to the toothpaste. Among the many things Benny found exasperating about me was my refusal to let him glue the tiles back. “I want Daniel to have something to x when he gets back,” I explained. “So he’l feel at home.”

In the novels my father sends me from Belgium, September is an autumn month: the days grow cooler, leaves turn, people become pensive. We like to pretend that here, too, September brings a gentle foreshadowing of winter, and that today and yesterday were exceptions, but we know we’re lying to ourselves. The weather forecast promised a sweltering hamseen day. I extracted a pair of blue cot on trousers and a short-sleeved black top from amidst the household debris strewn on the oor. The place was a mess, as usual. Then I prepared my camera, covered my face and arms with sunscreen, packed water and a hat, and slid my mobile phone into my front pocket.

It was stil early, so I sat down at my computer and worked on my latest novel. I pay the mortgage by writing anonymous novels in which beautiful women with euphonious names swoon into the arms of sardonic but ultimately pliant men, always dark, always handsome.

The guidelines have changed over the years; the list of words they want me to use and the types of sexual acts they want me to describe have expanded. But basical y the rules are the same. The plot has to move slowly but inexorably toward a satisfying climax (romantic conquest, marriage) which is also the resolution, and the characters have to speak like imaginary people in a textbook on earthlings, a textbook used on a distant planet by creatures who have never met any earthlings but have done some research and guessed the rest. I wrote without thinking, my mind wandering.

“Give me a sign, darling,” Angeline said. “Give me a sign that you wil stand by me. Anything at al , that I can keep next to my heart.”

“Take this ring,” Pierre said, removing the gold and emerald ring from his own nger. “Wear this ring around your neck and each time your heart beats my sword wil —”

I listened to music as I wrote, the songs Daniel and I loved, and also new ones that had come out since he left. Mercy, mercy on us al . Or funny songs that Daniel would have enjoyed singing. Why did you tel your mother I come too fast? Why didn’t you tel her about that time in the car, or about the tat oo I got just for you? More cynical songs had also come out in recent years. Back in high school they shared you in the shed like a package from home, but they’re not the sort who get caught, they’re the sort who get medals.

At eight-thirty Odelia knocked on the door. I saved the few paragraphs I had writ en and we walked to her car.

I fol owed Daniel to his smal , tinny-looking car, the kind you expect wil shat er, cartoon-style, into a thousand pieces, leaving a heap of metal in the middle of the street. But miraculously it worked.

“I don’t know,” he said as he drove down the dark streets. “You’re sort of young. Is this even legal?”

“You can’t be much older than me!”

“I’m twenty-nine.”

“Real y? You don’t look it. I guess because you’re a singer— performers always look young. Anyhow, I’m nineteen. Nineteen and two months. My birthday is March 15. The Ides of March.”

He smiled. “The band’s just a hobby—a way to earn some extra cash. I’m an architect. I’m saving up so I can build my own house, one day when I’m eighty. I live with my grandmother, by the way, so be warned. But she won’t bother us.”

“Oh.” I was disappointed. A grandmother wasn’t as bad as a girlfriend, of course, but could definitely put a damper on my plans.

“She’s nearly blind,” he reassured me. “And I’m sure she’s asleep by now.”

“How come you live with her?”

“She doesn’t want to go to a residence, the idea terri es her. She was in the camps; I guess she’s get ing a bit mixed up and she thinks we want to take her back there. We drove her to see a residence, it was such a nice place, but she had hysterics the whole time. We can’t a ord a ful -time nurse, of course, so I look after her. I don’t mind, it’s bet er than living with flatmates. What about you, Dana? Where do you live?”

“Oh, it’s a long story. Nowhere, real y.”

“Oh, it’s a long story. Nowhere, real y.”

“Nowhere?”

“It’s a long story—I’l tel you another time.”

“The mystery soldier from nowhere.”

Daniel’s grandmother lived in a four-story apartment house on a quiet street lined with palm trees.

“It’s a bit cramped,” Daniel warned me as we climbed the stairs to the third floor.

I watched him unlock the door, and it seemed to me this was the most erotic and exciting thing I would ever experience, no mat er how long I lived and no mat er how many wonderful things happened to me. Daniel unlocking the door at that moment, unlocking it for the two of us, his beautiful hand on the key, the key turning: the entire universe was compressed into this smal motion, and I was the person who’d been chosen to witness it.

Al the lights were on in the at. A narrow hal way lined with old books opened onto a living room decorated with ugly, imsy furniture from the fifties. It was the sort of furniture I always found heartbreaking: the square, bright orange sofa cushions, the sofa’s thin wooden arms, rickety side tables, matching scarlet and green horse-head lamps, the shortwave radio from the Mandate period, the mandatory maroon carpet on the stone oor. There were two doors along the wal on the right. The farthest one was half open and evidently led to a bedroom: soft, irregular snores drifted out of the room like crooked musical notes. Daniel smiled at me. “No need to whisper,” he said. “She sleeps like a log.” Even there, where Daniel’s grandmother was sleeping, the light had been left on.