“I’m listening,” I replied, giving my head a shake.
“I was asked to write a big piece on that director with the new movie,” he said. “To follow him around for a few days, on set and everything.”
“Okay, and—?” I replied, indifferent.
“He’s filming in Portugal, and they suggested that I go with them.” Halimi had been very matter-of-fact these last few days. Though he clung to me at night, crushing me like a drowning man grasping at a life raft, and ambushed me on the way to or from the shower, pulling me after him into the bedroom for urgent, vigorous sex, throughout the day we mostly talked only about necessary things regarding Lily and the household. In the evenings, we watched movies and TVshows, but usually within ten minutes, the two of us were asleep on the couch.
“Portugal?” I repeated. “When? For how long? And they’ll pay for all of it? Who suggested it?” I remembered to ask. Since he had finished his role as chief editor ofFree to Be, Halimi occasionally freelanced, writing articles for various weekend editions and sometimes weeklies and monthlies, too, but he was mainly concentrating on his radio show.
“Next week, for four days. They’re covering all expenses. And it wasFree to Bethat suggested it.”
My heart skipped a beat.
“What, did she call you?” I asked, more surprised than horrified.
“Not her. Anat, her assistant.”
About a month after Lily recovered from strep, we were driving back from a visit to my parents in Jerusalem. It was the end of the weekend, and traffic back into Tel Aviv was completely backed up. Lily fell asleep in the back, and I began to drift off too. Halimi’s phone was stationed on its mount between the air vents, since he had used it to check where the traffic jams were worst. Not that it helped.
We had walked around the Nachlaot neighborhood a lot that weekend. The previous afternoon, Lily had stayed in to watchAladdinwith my dad while my mom lay down to rest. Halimi and I went to stretch our legs to the tunes of the Sabbath songs coming from the synagogues. The pink light of sunset painted all the houses gold, and clusters of children dressed in white played outside to the lively sounds of clattering dishes in advance of their Sabbath dinners. Halimi and I walked from my parents’ house to the center of town and back, making occasional stops on the way to sit a little and smoke a cigarette.
Finally, with great difficulty, I managed to tell Halimi that I could not handle his affair with Nina. That the lies and ongoing betrayal had traumatized me. And that even though I believed in sexual freedom andthe possibility of free love, in this particular instance I felt burned. And that without honesty, it could not work. Halimi nodded heavily and pulled me to him again and again, promising me that it was really over. That Nina knew but was having a hard time letting it go. That he could not simply break it off with her (“heartlessly,” he quoted me to myself from the start of our relationship), but that both of them knew that it could not go on.
Now, in the car, I leaned my head on the window with a feeling of pleasant fatigue, like I had finished a marathon.
A loud WhatsApp notification sounded, and the whole car was illuminated by the green light of his phone. “Tomorrow at seven but I won’t have much time,” came a message from Nina across the screen.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” said Halimi in a panic. I turned automatically to look at Lily. Her head was slumped to the side, deep in sleep. I turned back to the road.
Another message hummed—she had sent something from YouTube. I clicked on the link before Halimi could stop me.
“Born to Die” by Lana Del Rey. I pressed on the link at once. I did not know the song or the clip.
The pretty Lana, nude, in the arms of some tattooed stud against the background of the American flag. Sighing in a grand hall or cathedral. Then, Lana sitting on some kind of throne, with tigers on either side of her, singing of not being heartbroken. Then, Lana running over to the tattooed man, standing in the dark beside his car, and beginning to make out with him passionately.
Halimi recovered from his shock and turned off the device, pulled it off its mount, and threw it into the back seat. I stared at my window.
“Ditush …” said Halimi, pleading.
“Shut up,” I cried in a whisper. “Just shut up!” I said aloud, but low.
“I don’t …” he began. Something loosened up on the road, and the cars began to move. He drove the whole way home in silence. I inhaledthrough blocked nostrils, held back the crying until it hurt in my ears. I desperately wanted a cigarette.
“She’s just being annoying,” Halimi managed to say when he found parking not too far from the house and killed the engine. I didn’t have the energy to try to understand what he was referring to. I got out of the car and said, “Are you taking Lily, or should I?” For a moment, he looked as if he’d been punched in the stomach. Then, he came to his senses, undid Lily’s seatbelt, and gathered her into his arms.
I listened to the Lana Del Rey song for days. I analyzed every nuance, toying with new interpretations of the words—Lana singing of feeling intensely alone on a Friday night, of love sometimes being insufficient, and—most disturbingly—of a man who prefers his girls on the edge. I kept racking my brain over the meaning of Lana—covered in blood and unmistakably dead in the arms of her tattooed stud—at the end of the video.
I continued to spy on Nina as if possessed—any time there was a gap of more than two hours between her posts, I would go into distress, refreshing the page like a crazy person, looking for her in responses, in tags, in other people’s pictures—from the magazine or from the café where I knew she often sat. I analyzed every post, every tweet, and every picture as if it were meant for me personally. I hated her with a passion.
I also monitored Halimi. Over the years, he had almost entirely disappeared from social networks, even if he continued to surf them to gather information. He always had privacy settings enabled for WhatsApp and Facebook—nobody could know when he was last seen or if he had read their messages. But it was impossible to hide the feature that shows when you are online, and every time I sent him a message, I felt like a maniac, gripped with self-loathing.
In our sad, often silent conversations, I managed to make it clear to him that if he was not absolutely available to me, I would no longerbelieve that he loved me. He made an effort to respond immediately to even my most prosaic text messages (we’re out of milk, buy Advil, we’re at the playground), as well as the obsessive and despondent ones (why aren’t you answering, where are you, when are you coming home), with what struck me as increasing impatience. When he did not answer me at once, I would call, enraged. This happened at least three times a day during that period.
This is like the worst kind of drugwas my mantra in those days. Only it was in my head, because I was unable to share this dark corner with my sister or with Libby. Each time I humiliated myself, I would be hit with existential depression and nausea, but still I would continue to send endless messages and call furiously, usually to find that he was in the middle of a meeting, or on his way home, or in the bathroom.
Halimi swore on his late father that he had told Nina that they had to stop seeing each other, but he claimed that he could not avoid running into her at work.
“Everybody at the magazine must know about you two,” I said one evening when he returned home from work later than usual and poured himself a generous drink with the expression of a victim of circumstance.
