“Monday at Hotel Montefiore ♥♥♥,” sent by Nina Lev-Ari.
The tall and beautiful Nina, the mythological trendspotter, always ahead of theFree to Befashion curve. The brilliant and talented Nina, feminist in all the right ways, whose articles were always the magazine’s most popular on social media. My hands began to shake. I felt the blend of vodka and orange juice I’d been drinking all night come up in my throat.
I recalled an incident I hadn’t given much thought to at the time: Once, when I dropped by Halimi’s office to pick up Lily, who was playing with the secretary at the editorial desk, Nina sat facing Halimi.Something about their body language aroused my suspicion, which at the time seemed funny. They both appeared relaxed in my presence, and when I asked Halimi if they had something going on, he laughed and said there was zero chance of that. “She’s a cold fish,” he’d said.
A few months had gone by since that incident. I hadn’t even thought about it. It had been a long time since Halimi’s last affair. I put it down to his sense of paternal responsibility and general fatigue. Sometime during the past year, he did tell me about two “incidents”—one at a party thrown by the magazine, and the other at a club that had since closed. He used the same phrase for both: “I had a fling with some chick.” In both cases, it was a random woman he didn’t know or barely knew. He didn’t go into details, and I didn’t pressure him—I was happy and grateful that he even told me. I wasn’t at all jealous. I was reassured that we’d beaten the system. “It works!” I told my sister euphorically, and she nodded wisely.
Libby, as it happens, had told me several times in recent months that she couldn’t believe there was no one else. “He would have told me,” I stopped her short, faithful to the memory of all those nights in which I’d detailed my own “incidents” in clubs and the sense of joint destiny.
Now, I went into his WhatsApp and scrolled through all the messages between Halimi and Nina. Most of them were pretty tame, but there was one message from about a month earlier that set off alarm bells. It appeared to be a response to previous messages, sent out of the blue in the middle of the day after a few message-less days. “It’s not fair to ask things like that,” she wrote, followed by two emojis: an eggplant and a peach. It was obvious he’d deleted the rest of the incriminating evidence; this one had simply slipped under Halimi’s radar.
As if I were speaking to her that very moment on Zoom, I heard my sister’s voice telling me, “Don’t jump to conclusions. Maybe it’s a business meeting, and because the magazine is picking up the tab, they’vedecided to indulge themselves at a fancy restaurant. Maybe the message with the eggplant and the peach was in reaction to some remark Halimi made at the office, and they’re just kidding around.”
Shut the fuck up, I answered my sister, angrily terminating the imaginary call. In my mind’s eye, I saw Halimi in his office, fixing Nina with that gaze of utter adoration, the one that used to be fixed on me.
I knew that when Halimi woke up and found his phone, he would realize someone had opened her message. I didn’t want him to know I’d read it.
I heard Lily stirring in her bedroom and knew this was my opportunity. I acted completely cold-blooded, calculated. Like a lioness in the savanna, I thought to myself. I went into Lily’s room and sat down on her bed. She opened her eyes almost immediately and smiled up at me. She fumbled for her pacifier, which had fallen out during the night. A few minutes later, she was already on the couch, waiting for me to heat her milk and honey.
“Did you play the animal game yesterday?” I asked her. Halimi had a game on his cell phone downloaded especially for Lily, a highly recommended app he’d read about in the “Busy Kids” column of the magazine.
Lily shook her head and grabbed Halimi’s cell phone. I turned up the volume on this noisy game, which was very unlike me. A few minutes later, I heard Halimi padding into the kitchen. I poured myself some coffee.
“Good morning,” I said. “The Rozhevsky-Halimi household is up early today.”
“Did you sleep at all?” he asked foggily. “I’m going to brush my teeth.”
“Do you want me to make you a cup of coffee?” I shouted after him.
“Sure,” he answered from the hallway.
As we drank our coffee together in the living room, Halimi shot Lily a look. “How long has she been playing that game?” Before I had timeto reply, he said, “Come on, Lily, enough already. Give me the phone.” She protested, he didn’t relent, and I called her to come eat her oatmeal at the kitchen table.
I watched him examining the phone. A few seconds later, he looked up at me with an alarmed expression on his face. I smiled sweetly and said, “Everything okay?”
“Hunky-dory,” he answered. “Maybe I should get one of those kiddie tablets for Lily. I’m sick of her hogging my phone.”
I felt the blood rushing to my head again. “Watch her for a minute, so she doesn’t fling oatmeal all over the floor,” I said and went to throw up in the bathroom.
CHAPTER 12
On Monday morning, again I woke up after Halimi had taken Lily to preschool. The night before, he told me the editorial meeting at the radio station had been canceled because of a tax audit. I wouldn’t let this stop me.I’llfind some excuse, I told myself before falling asleep that night.
A few minutes after opening my eyes, I wondered whether I’d be able to cross the spring to Jean d’Ibelin. The days that had passed since our last meeting had blurred the memory into a kind of reverie. I recalled the sight of the Crusader fortress in the last crazy dream I had, beside what must have been the Phoenician port, with modern Atlit in the background. I was sweating a little under the winter blanket, which we had not yet swapped for something lighter because the nights were still chilly.
Twang, twang, the strings reverberated between my ears. I sat up in bed. I fixed my eyes on the closet and wondered what to wear: something not too modest, but definitely not risqué. And something that would be comfortable to wear by the spring. But not too weird if, say, we rode to the fortress.
I chose a woolen dress in red, from way back when I lived in Jerusalem, one of those nostalgic pieces I insisted on keeping rather thantossing into the huge trash bags I donated before we moved. After giving birth, most of my clothes were too small for me, but I was confident I’d get my body back someday. In Atlit, where 24/7 kiosks and restaurant deliveries were not around to tempt me, I had lost a few pounds. I tried the dress on and thanked the powers that be for providing a zipper. A little tight over the chest, but overall nice and comfortable and timeless.
“Wow, look at you,” Halimi said, glancing up from his computer as I came in to turn the kettle on. I coughed with embarrassment and wiped my glasses’ lenses. “Do you remember this dress?” I asked Halimi, my back to him. “Brrr, it’s cold this morning.”
“Sure I remember,” Halimi said, turning back to the computer screen. He was transcribing an interview with the editor of an important American journal. Sometimes, he was asked to write articles for weekend magazines.
“Listen, I’ll probably be back late from Tel Aviv today,” I went on, pouring boiling water into a coffee mug.
The clatter of the keyboard stopped. I turned to face him. “Coffee?” I said before taking a sip.
“How come you’re going to Tel Aviv?” Halimi asked. He crossed one leg over the other and pulled out a cigarette.
