Café Shira, page 10
He sat for five years in an old café downtown, until it changed hands and changed character. He had trouble getting over the change. After all, a coffeehouse isn’t just a coffeehouse. It doesn’t just belong to the proprietor. Of the two words, coffee is one Raanan can do without. He doesn’t even like coffee. He’s here because of house.
Raanan never had a real home. The one he grew up in in Raanana (from which he got his name) held two opposite poles: a domineering mother and a submissive, quarrelsome father. At home, he never felt at home. It was only at an aunt’s house that he found a kind of refuge. When he was discharged from the army he married the first girl he’d ever gone out with, a girl who resembled his mother, in a way. He tries now to remember how he once loved her. With the passing years, he finds it harder and harder to believe there ever was real love there. It might have been a kind of longing, an attempt to make his life into a Hollywood romance. Growing up, we all do that, don’t we? Raanan tries to draw this in the upper left-hand corner of the page.
His ex-wife still occupies a central position in the picture. He tries to understand how he chose her, how he didn’t see his mistake, how he failed to grasp who she really was. With the appearance of the monster, he himself changed. Instead of Raanan I there was now Raanan II, a man who shouted and lied and was vindictive. He knows he has gone astray, but he doesn’t know how to retrace his steps.
After married life turned into hell, at least there was the sex. He can’t forgive himself for this either. How could he have slept with the insufferable woman who mistreated him day after day? And what made the sex as passionate as ever? And how, against all logic, did he stay in a marriage that was destroying him, emotionally and financially?
Since his mother became terminal, he has had thoughts about the way out. And about the way, in general. How he has lost the way that once seemed so clear. And how there’s no way back. And why life is so short, when it seems so long.
And the hardest questions are about what happens between men and women, young and old. With his good mind, healthy instincts, and honest curiosity, he can understand it all, more or less. But how could he have gone on ravishing that woman’s body (he can’t bring himself to name her) even after realizing that she was bedeviling his life? And how could he have made his peace with her betrayals? And her wastefulness? She was bankrupting him, brazenly and gleefully! How could the planned, systematic destruction of his little world have become her life’s project, while at the same time his sole consolation was her well-maintained body, the very body that housed the most perverted soul he had ever encountered?
During the year after he left her, he invested most of his energy and interest in masturbation (represented in the sketch by a big circle on the lower right). He discovered that it wasn’t necessary to have a partner, and there was no need to compromise. For him, it isn’t masturbation but real sex, a full and satisfying relationship with himself, and not just with himself, but with the original Raanan, the Raanan he has been trying all along to sketch afresh.
He studies the almost-finished picture. A kind of balloon hovers over his ex-wife, symbolizing the fetus she aborted before they were married. Raanan himself is represented by X’s in two different places. His cousin (and only friend) Udi is in the lower left-hand corner, like a cryptic inscription in an old yearbook. He really is long gone, Udi, a reminder of a pleasant childhood and unfulfilled promises. It was Udi who once saw one of his sketches and said, “Oh my, it’s like your mother’s refrigerator.” It was only then that it became clear to Raanan that his drawing was a way of putting things in order, the way his mother covered her refrigerator with magnets holding innumerable notes and reminders that organized her world and the lives of everyone in the family. His mother believed there was nothing that couldn’t be taken care of if you only put a note about it on the refrigerator. And the truth is, for her it worked.
The problem is that it doesn’t work for him. The more obsessively he sketches himself, the more the objective eludes him. He continues to get lost in his map of himself, a map he tries to draw (on the one hand) and to navigate by (on the other)—in other words, to create and be created at the same time.
What’s left? What’s left is Rutha, the waitress, whom he draws tenderly, lovingly. Neither symbols nor signs, but a real person, with a soft face, long legs, hair spilling over her shoulders. A pretty realistic picture, a pretty good one. Again and again, he addresses himself patiently to his drawing of her, ten minutes at a time. He feels she deserves it.
As he finishes, Raanan notices a fair-haired teenage boy, wearing a red baseball cap, putting a laptop on the next table, and when he turns it on, three naked girls appear on the screen, two thin and one ample, and they are doing unbelievable things, first with each other and then with two men in helmets.
One of the girls looks familiar.
Princess Neurosa
She simply had no choice. When Raanan threw her out, she needed money.
It was a bad marriage, but still, he was the man of her life. And even if they got on each other’s nerves, she still loved him. She loves him even now.
By the time it was over, she was exhausted. What else did she have beside him? In the space of one week she went from being a self-confident married woman to a broken vessel, an economic ruin, stuck in a single miserable room with two Ethiopian roommates who sometimes gave her leftovers from their overly spicy meals.
The invitation to take part in the film was the only work offer she got. Nothing about it appealed to her, certainly not the romantic parts of the screenplay. But she had to make a living somehow. Had to.
Of course, she had some soul-searching to do, too. How could she have been so trusting of Raanan, the perfect man, who in the end treated her like an object, used her and threw her away? Had she not been considerate enough of him? Maybe she hadn’t tried hard enough to become part of his world. Yes, she had been too self-absorbed. So what if he’d been a bit tightfisted? “Stingy Raanan,” his friends called him. He did have a good heart, and she always knew that. So how come what happened, happened? But enough wallowing in such questions. She understood it was either going to be a moral accounting or a financial one. She couldn’t do both at once, and the financial accounting was more pressing.
Friends had told her over and over that it wasn’t her but him. Raanan had to make more of an effort, find a better-paying job, suggest trips and entertainment. So what if he’s good-looking? they said. Inside he’s just a boring blockhead who can’t step out of the box. Look how he ignores his mother. Do you think he’ll treat you any better when he doesn’t find you sexy anymore? Two of her friends, who had gone through terrible crises with men, warned her about things that actually happened to them in the end. It’s no accident that he accuses you of infidelity, they explained. It’s because he can’t imagine anything else. And you never even dreamed of trying another man.
You’ll see: he’ll finish with you by email, one of them had told her. The next day, he finished with her by email.
The fact that it was a kid who offered her a part in a film appealed to her. She didn’t want any men in the vicinity, but a teenager, well, he’s like a child. A twelfth-grader learning film, with a lot of artistic ideas and all. He had struck up a conversation with her on a bus, talking about his senior project. True, there was something bold about him, but also a certain innocence. He wanted to make an artistic film. There was a fund for quality films made by high schoolers, and it was backing him, a fund that selected carefully among thousands of youngsters, and he had gotten a big grant from them, so money was no problem. She had always wished for news that money was no problem. There would be a little nudity, he had said bashfully. I hope it won’t put you off. You can’t do anything artistic without that. And she would meet interesting people on the set. She was enthusiastic, curious to meet bohemian types, to be exposed to the world. It never occurred to her that this was the type of film he was planning. That innocence of hers. It would be the death of her.
When she was little, they told her, “You’re so pretty, you mustn’t be naïve.” When Raanan saw her for the first time he said, “Tell me, weren’t you the model for the Barbie doll?” “No,” she said, “I really wasn’t.” And if there was something she could be proud of, it was that she always stood up to him. When he suggested she go into modeling, she said no, too. She didn’t want to make money off her beauty. As long as she had a choice, at least. She enjoyed being looked at, but beauty wasn’t a profession.
What was left of her childhood dreams about princes and princesses? Her pink bedroom was still there in her parents’ house, kept exactly the way it had been. When she visited there, she saw herself from the outside, sitting in the big window on the second floor like Rapunzel, braiding her hair and staring sadly off into space. In the velvet confines of her room, in a box padded with bright red silk, lay, even now, a scrapbook of a thousand princesses, which she had begun at the age of three and continued working on all through the years, as a teenager and even as a young woman. She should have come to her senses but never did. Each day, she would paste in another princess. Most of them she drew herself, wanting to infuse them with her imaginings. A psychologist to whom her parents paid a lot of money said it was a cause for concern at her age (she was already seventeen), bordering on neurosis (which, with an a at the end, she thought was a nice name for a princess: a blonde, like her, with a full-skirted lavender dress), and she kept at it. A person can dream! Without that, what good are we?
Even after everything Raanan did to her, she isn’t willing to give up her princess dreams. She will marry a real prince yet. Last week, she bought the latest issue of Getting Married, and she browses through the magazine in her all-too-abundant free time. Beauty salons, bridal gowns, cosmeticians, luxurious catering halls. It feels good to read such things and study closely the photos of women more beautiful than herself. She’s not really beautiful, she thinks. Close to beautiful, maybe, but that nose . . . that tummy . . . that chest.
Lately, she’s found a wonderful way of passing the time in the wee hours of the morning when she can’t sleep: she looks for marriage proposals on YouTube and gets excited about each of them, as if she herself were the astonished girl whose boyfriend was opening the door, coming into her room accompanied by a wind ensemble, and singing “Will You Marry Me?” in one language after another. But her favorite proposal was that of one young man (very short and poker-faced) who organized a big dance party in Central Park, joined by every chance passersby, as if all New York and, in fact, the whole world, were celebrating along with him, and then a submarine surfaced in the pond and a hand extended from it with a box containing a ring, and a duo serenaded her in Italian. Every night, she watches these videos, imagining herself in the role of the desired bride, and weeps, and sometimes she remembers how Raanan surprised her one night when they were making love by pulling a ring out from under the pillow. “I don’t want an audience,” he said, “or witnesses or fireworks. I just want one thing, and that’s you.”
And now, on her way to Café Shira to get paid for her work on the film, she is once again feeling optimistic. She doesn’t care particularly about what happened on the set or even remember it. To begin with, they met, three young women who didn’t know one another, and had drinks. One of them, a girl from Afula, asked her, “Is it going to be serious or funny?” And the other girl, who actually had some acting experience, said, “Did they tell you, too, that it would be something artistic?” And they laughed and laughed and undressed each other, and when it was all over she had some coffee and thought about Raanan.
Rutha’s Embarrassment
When she first began to work at Café Shira, Rutha was constantly blushing. When Avigdor asked her to pay more attention to the way she dressed, she would blush. When asked if there was any decaf coffee, she would blush. Even when they called her over, she would blush.
A month passed, and Rutha was no less embarrassed. At times she had trouble getting up to go to work for fear of the encounters that awaited her. It took months for her to learn to live with it. She has noticed that when she is busy taking care of customers and thinking less about herself, she feels less embarrassment. She focuses on other people readily because they arouse her curiosity. If at one time it made her angry to be expected to look after everyone, now she rather enjoys it. She is part mother, part aunt, part sister to them all. She wants them to feel good. More and more, she understands what drives each of them. Everyone has his troubles. There are those who suffer from uncertainty. Or boredom. Or anxiety. Or inner confusion. And there are those who fear a death sentence hanging over them. All place their trust in her. They want her to be there for them, warm, cheerful, and nonjudgmental.
In this way, she is just the opposite of Avigdor, whose years at the café have led him to see everyone as a potential enemy, exploiter, or leech. Who recalls now that he once wanted to turn Jerusalem into a vegan capital? Or that he once wanted to provide high schoolers with a platform for their artistic talents?
Lately, Rutha has taken to writing down reflections and observations in a little notebook. “Raymond got out of bed on the wrong side today.” “Avigdor hates everybody, especially himself.” “Naor Sela is in love with love.” “Something big is going to happen today, I can just feel it.”
She isn’t sure she likes what she has become. She feels as though she’s playing a role. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome The Waitress! She’ll bring you whatever you want, she’ll wipe away the crumbs, she’ll smile until her face turns inside out. Come one, come all!
In this, too, Avigdor is her opposite. He’s happy to be the introvert he’s become. The last twenty years have taught him he can’t be nice to everyone. So why even try? In his latest incarnation, running away from people and the café and eventually the city, he is truest to himself. He doesn’t have to be nice. He’s liberated.
Rutha looks out the window and sees Christian limping toward the café. She goes to lend him a hand or a shoulder, but before she has a chance he’s already inside, with a smile on his face that says, “I’m happy to see you.” It could just be that he’s happy to be getting some coffee. (Who knows better than she how happy people can be when their coffee is coming?)
As she puts a menu down in front of him, she notices that he, too, is blushing. Wait, how will you see me if you don’t look at me? The whole afternoon, she looks at him from her perch by the bar. His seriousness excites her. With someone like him she could be lighthearted, as she would like to be. If only he would give her a chance! But how is this going to happen? Another waitress (Rona, for example) would already have asked him if he needs a place to stay, offered him dinner at her place, and then, in the morning, breakfast. She knows because they tell her. Rona, who was supposed to take over for her this evening but left her in the lurch because she was “sick” (meaning she probably had a hookup), loves to tell long stories about what happened in bed, including before and after. Story hour, she calls it. And because she tells the stories over and over to whoever will listen, you can figure out that the details, and even the whole plot, change according to the audience, the time of day, and her level of inspiration.
Rutha is disgusted by these stories. She’s disgusted with other people’s stories. She wants one of her own.
At the Same Table
The woman who comes into Café Shira in the afternoon has on a hat with a brim so wide it looks like a mushroom. Beneath it are huge sunglasses. She doesn’t take off either the hat or the glasses, which gives Rutha the feeling she is running away from something or someone. Maybe it has to do with the bandage on her ear. Someone has attacked her, it seems. Rutha doesn’t know that this woman, wearing a mauve dress that highlights a good figure, is running away from herself, and she isn’t exactly a woman, and in fact her name is Avigdor. As there are no vacant tables in the whole café, she seats her with Christian, who has come back, limping, straight to the round table where he sat this morning.
This is a hobby of hers, to match people up when the café gets crowded. A kind of sport or diversion. What would Ruhama Shittin and the boy in the baseball cap who had never read a book in his life talk about? Once, when she put him at the poet’s table, Ruhama let down the literary veil that separated her from the rest of the world and became a mother figure. And once, Rutha paired Raymond with a diplomat, with whom, to her surprise, he had a two-hour conversation about the Iranian bomb, a favorite topic of Raymond’s, who enjoys watching people go crazy with worry. And once she seated a wispy female student with G. Shturman, an elderly photographer who had documented life in the country as far back as the British Mandate, and it flowered into a friendship, over the course of which the student accompanied the childless gentleman through the stages of failing health, from a wheelchair to an oxygen tank to the hospice on Mount Scopus. When she inherited all his property, the café broke up into two camps: those who were moved by the marvels of human friendship, and those who saw it as a cynical, calculated ploy by an unattractive young woman with an elderly man whose days were numbered. The art collector Odelia Etrogi claimed to have seen the student fondling Shturman under his shirt and heard him growl with pleasure, “Don’t stop, don’t stop.” If the story is true, those were his last words before his brain got all tangled and nothing further escaped his lips.
“Do you mind if I sit with you?” Avigdor asks in English, in a high-pitched voice. Christian looks up and laughs. He recognizes Avigdor right away, despite the dress, the makeup, the hat, and the sunglasses. Looking at the woman whose ear is bandaged where Raymond struck it with a stone, he sees past her outward appearance into her tortured soul. He remembers that only a few hours earlier Avigdor’s face looked familiar from a dream he had had repeatedly in recent months, about an angel (Rutha?) who would lead him through the streets of Jerusalem and the byways of the Galilee.
