Edeet Ravel - Look for Me

“Benny, I’m too tired for a visit today, I’m worn out from the demo.” I took of my shoes and flopped down on my bed.

He sighed. “Why, why, why do you do these things? Where were you, anyhow?” He sat down at the edge of the bed.

I told him about the demonstration. It had not been reported on the news, he didn’t know it had taken place.

“The last place on earth I would want to be, the last thing on earth I would want to do,” he said, shaking his head.

“I’m sure there are a zil ion things you would want to do even less,” I said. “Swal owing a live cockroach. Get ing into a booth ful of scorpions. Shooting a child.”

“You have an answer for everything.” He sighed again. “So I can’t stay? I just had another visit from Miriam, I need someone sane to talk to.”“I’m sure I’m as messed up as Miriam. Come back later, I’m going to sleep.”

“Your eyes are red.”

“From the tear gas.”

“I can’t understand why you do these things to yourself. On behalf of people who are trying to kil you, people who cheer every time a bus with someone like you on it explodes.”

“Please, Benny. I’m tired.”

“Okay, I’m going, do you need anything?”

“Just sleep.”

“What does tear gas feel like?’ he asked, curious.

“It stings. Your lungs burn. You feel like throwing up, or at least I do. You get scared.”

“Poor Dana.”

“No, poor Palestinians.”

Benny sighed heavily. “You have a good heart, Dana, but you refuse to see the writing on the wal . I’l drop by later, unless business picks up.”

“Great.” I shut my eyes, and the sound of Benny shut ing the door as he left was already mingling with a dream.

First Daniel and I fixed up our flat, then we married, and then we fought.

When Daniel and I bought the three rooms that became our ground- oor at, they looked as if they’d drawn inspiration from those black-and-white Time-Life photos of inner-city blight: broken sinks, cakes of dirt in every corner, spot ed mirrors nailed to the wal . Prostitutes had lived in the building, and they’d left behind not only mirrors but also their shiny damask bedspreads. Daniel was horri ed when I suggested we wash the bedspreads and use them as sofa covers.

The building was also stained and run down. But this was prime seaside property, and even the smal est of the three ats was very expensive. Daniel’s parents were heavily in debt, so my father came to the rescue. “It’s the least I can do, duckie,” he said.

Daniel’s younger sister Nina moved in with their grandmother, though she chose to sleep in the living room and to use the converted balcony for meditation. Nina was twenty-two and recently divorced; she was also unemployed and “o men” for the time being. Moving in with Granny suited her; in any case it was bet er than going back to her parents’ house. At Granny’s she could play tapes of her guru’s teachings and listen to Ravi Shankar to her heart’s content. She had even started giving yoga lessons to Elena, the prim Russian woman who came to read to Granny, and who, as it turned out, had back problems.

Daniel and I set up a tent in one of the rooms and lived in it while we worked on the at. We broke down wal s, retiled the floor, plastered and painted. Daniel was good with his hands, and he engraved smal angels in the molding along the ceiling. The wal s were replaced by arched passages: Daniel didn’t like doors.

When the at was ready we folded up the tent and bought a bed and olive green sofas and a faded olive and pink Turkish carpet for the living room. Then we invited everyone we knew to celebrate our marriage. My father arrived without Git e, who had lost her parents in an air crash and was afraid of ying. She sent profuse apologies and a charming tapestry of tiny happy people enjoying themselves in a park.

The wedding party lasted al night: over three hundred guests crowded into the two empty apartments on the third oor, which we had il egal y taken over for the evening. Eventual y the party spread to the beach, where we danced to live music and stu ed ourselves with catered food until sunrise.

In the early morning, after al the guests had left, Daniel and I walked slowly back to our at and opped down onto the new green sofas.

The caterers had tidied up, more or less, but gifts lay scat ered everywhere, a sea of boxes and packages. The smel of grass and hashish and ordinary cigaret e smoke hung heavily in the air.

“The emperors of hash and grass have fled,” I said, “leaving a trail behind them.”

“You’re more stoned than I thought.”

“I’m not. I didn’t smoke.”

“It’s enough to breathe in the air here.”

“It’s childish to humanize objects. I read that somewhere. But I can’t help it. You’ve married a childish person, Daniel.”

This was Daniel’s cue to say something a ectionate and reassuring, but he didn’t answer. It was the rst time he used silence against me, and I understood that we were moving toward a fight, though I was stil hoping to stop it.

We were not used to discord. Until then we had only wondered, day after day and night after night, at how alike we were: the coincidences were almost alarming, and had we been inclined toward mysticism we might have posited fantastic phenomena: twins in another lifetime, carriers of sibling souls. We had the same hairbrush and toothbrush; we owned the same scarf, which we had both picked up at the same street stal . Our handwriting was nearly identical. In high school we had both given oral presentations on manipulation in the media, and a week before we met we had clipped the same cartoon from the newspaper. We even had male and female versions of the same name.

And now, married, exhausted, trying to hold on to my happiness, I said, “I wonder how a person knows. I wonder how you know when you see someone that this person is right for you, just by watching them sing and tel dumb jokes onstage.”

“You must have a sixth sense, Dana. I had no clue at al .”

“I know.”

“I barely noticed you at the wedding.”

“Don’t rub it in!”

Again, Daniel said nothing. “You told me you thought I was cute,” I reminded him, stil hoping to recapture the bliss I’d felt only seconds before. But it was no longer possible to avoid the tension in the air, which was sliding and slipping around us like a filament of barbed wire.

“I just wondered why you’d come in your uniform—I thought you were probably one of those people who wanted to show o that they were in the army.”

“I didn’t have a dress!”

“Yes, but I didn’t know that during the wedding.”

“What else? What else did you think?”

“That’s it.”

“And what about when I came up to you? What did you think then?”

“I figured you were horny.”

We’d had this conversation before—lovers always go back to the first innocent moments that spawned their love—but he had said kind and flat ering things. “Weren’t you at al at racted to me as a person?”

“I didn’t know you.”

“You thought I was some sort of desperate, pathetic loser?”

“No, I just thought you wanted sex.”

“So … when were you sure?”

“Wel , I’m sure now, of course.”

“Wel , I’m sure now, of course.”

I got up from the sofa and stared at him. I felt the fury rising in me. “Now! You weren’t sure until now? Can I ask why you suggested get ing married three days after we met?”

“You’re the one who suggested it, Dana. And I agreed, partly to help you get out of the army. I gured we could always get divorced if things didn’t work out.”