The Rainy Day Man: Contemporary Romance (Suspense and Political Mystery Book 1) (2 page)

             
"I'm glad you're calm, one can see that you're happy."

I would nod in assent and go into the next room to read the paper.  A large number of pictures, ceramic plaques and ornaments hung on the walls.  A tag was stuck on the back each expressing happy parents' gratitude to Hannah Simon for helping to cure their children of bed-wetting.  How many of the former bed-
wetters knew that that chapter of their lives was documented in our living-room?  Generally, when I thought about it, I regretted all the books I had left in hotel rooms and the life of Charles Vincent, which had not been documented but had evaporated with the secrecy of a fart.

     At a quarter to eight we would leave the house together, rows of cars spewing smoke out into the fresh morning air.  We heard the morning news program on the car radio.  Sometimes we talked, usually about minor topics which Hannah initiated.

"I think we ought to organize our Passover holiday," or "What do you think, maybe we should close the back balcony?"  My replies were directed at her as well as at the announcer who was speaking too close to my ear. 

             
"Mmm," I said, and, "Ahh."   Hannah would get out in the north of the city, two streets away from the Child Guidance Centre where she worked. 

"In the winter," she promised, "when it's raining, we'll have to change the route so that you can bring me right to the door."

              When I was left alone I took a cigarette from the hiding place under the seat.  Hannah was opposed to smoking. 

             
"You're fat, live under pressure and smoke."  In her view, I embodied all the risk factors.  "If only you would swim sometimes, like I do."  Since I could find no excuse I accepted my fate in that sphere too.  I swam energetically in the cool swimming pool, steering from side to side between crowds of splashing children, thinking: Who am I preserving this life for?

             
Maybe for Jonathan, who played chess with me and accompanied me to the cinema whenever I could drag him away from his endless exertions on the tennis court.  Sometimes we quarrelled mildly about how much sleep a sixteen-year-old boy needed or his desire for a motorbike.  Jonathan thought that I was unbending in my views.  As punishment, he would sometimes support Hannah's sermonizing, making remarks like, "If you’d been here, bringing me up, I wouldn't be behind in math..." 

             
At night I watched him as he slept and caressed his face.  Hannah was happy.  In her opinion, I was repaying myself for all the years I had missed.  In her profession they liked that kind of thing.  I could deceive anyone but myself:  Jonathan was only a shadow which my life had copied from what it might have been.

             
Who was left, then?

             
Only Lisa, it seemed.  I had picked her up one evening, after driving around for a long time.  That had been my practice for years, driving around, peering swiftly into the faces of the women as they were lit up for a moment in the headlights.  Something in it created an illusion of choice and mobility appropriate to a story from the Bible or a deed from the time of the knights errant.  I passed her several times before I dared honk at her.  She looked like a girl who had just stepped out of her house for a minute to buy something.  Her body was small and neat and the place where she stood was not usual for prostitutes.

We drove along the deserted quay of the old Tel Aviv Port.  On our right loomed large, dark storage sheds.  To our left lay the sea.  I stopped the car.  Lisa opened the door and put out the overhead light.  I put two bills into her hand.  She stuffed them into her purse, then leaned her head on the headrest and said nothing.

              I lifted the edge of her dress carefully, as if there was a chance she might refuse.  She placed her hands on her knees and pressed her thighs firmly together.  We were in the dark inside a car whose doors were wide open at the end of a quay which was like an island.  There was something captivating about it.  I realized that she might let me play the seduction game.  I stroked her knee.  Then I leaned over and kissed her neck.  She turned to me, wound her arms around my head and pulled my lips to hers.

It was more than I had dared to hope.  We made love at length, even with some tenderness, which reached its peak when I touched the mound between her thighs.  Old sensations returned to me.  After we had finished I drove the car through the darkness of the harbor, wondering whether to add something to the usual rate.  I was afraid to ask her, not wanting to break the spell.  Before we parted I asked her
her name and kissed her mouth once more.

             
In the days which followed I was imbued with a new vitality.  I seemed to be more patient, smiled more, took care not to put on weight and even went more willingly to the swimming-pool and lay by the water to acquire a tan.  My thinking became clearer too.  The sense of adventure sharpened it, giving it back the momentum it had lost.  At night, in my dreams, I would meet people I had known before, settle accounts, plot and plan - like a prisoner thinking about the thickness of his cell walls.  One dawn, just before the encounter with the dreariness of the morning and Hannah's insipid flesh, I thought about those last few days in Paris.

             
"I know!"  I suddenly shook Hannah by her shoulder.  "Your father!"

She turned over, offering her mouth for a kiss.

"Hell!" I jumped off the bed.  "Now I understand it all."

Her eyes were open by then.  Her night cream had left a damp stain on the pillow.  "What are you talking about?"

"About my coming back to Israel, the job that was arranged for me...  Your father fixed it all, didn't he?"

             
She raised herself, leaning back on her elbow and giving me her most placatory smile.  "I asked him to."

             
I got dressed quickly, without washing.  She was waiting for me by the door.

             
"What's got into you, what's wrong?  Every holiday you said that you'd like to stop travelling, to live quietly..."

"I just said that.  We all say things..."

              She put a freckled hand on my arm.  "Apart from that, you deserved the promotion.  Daddy just gave things the final push..."  Through the wide sleeve of her nightgown I could see her breast.  She noticed.  "We could be so happy..."

I pulled the door-handle.

"I know you, you'll calm down and understand that it was all for your own good..."

             
She was right.  By midday everything was alright again.  Around two o'clock Jonathan phoned my office and suggested that we go to a film.  Those were the consolations which Hannah in her wisdom offered.  How could I decline them?

             
Later, as we left the early show, we bought an evening paper.  A fuzzy picture took up a quarter of the front page: the Israeli ambassador in London had been shot two nights earlier.

"I knew him," I told Jonathan.  He examined the picture, narrowing his eyes, an expression he had inherited from Hannah.

"It's a good thing you're home," he said suddenly.  "It's safer here."  Were those his own thoughts or had they been planted in him?  One way or another, I stroked his head quickly, gripped by the well-known mixture of regret and a sense of having missed something.  When we got home I was seized by restlessness again.  Without turning the engine off I explained that I had to arrange something.  Jonathan got out, his face expressionless.  As I waited for the traffic lights to change I saw the back of his flannel shirt vanishing into the darkness.  I put the car into gear and drove to Lisa.

             
That meeting was as good as the previous one and this time I paid her double the usual fee.  She raked the bills into her purse without looking at them.  I was afraid that she had not realized their value, but I kept quiet.  As we got dressed I asked if we could have the next meeting in her flat.  She refused.  I did not insist.

     Next day, the first day of the war, I went to her again.  The streets were empty and she was not in her usual place. I parked on the pavement not far from there, by a flower shop. For the first time it occurred to me that she might be with another client.  I did not feel hurt, or even offended.  A trained mechanism in my mind knows when to regulate the stream.  After waiting for ten minutes I persuaded myself that the whole thing was not worth the effort.  Then I got out of the car, bought a bunch of flowers and drove home. 

     On Saturday we drove to visit the old man, my wife's father, at his kibbutz in the north.  He welcomed us in his room, surrounded by mementos and medals, which he collected with the same enthusiasm his daughter displayed for the gifts of grateful bedwetters. In what would Jonathan invest the family mania for collecting things?  With a trembling hand the old man extracted some aging oranges from a wooden bowl and cut them up.  The serenity in his face dispelled the old lion image which he carefully maintained through his terse sentences and brisk movements. 

             
"How's work?" he grated at me in a voice once considered stentorian.

"There is no work.  I'm completely unnecessary there..."

              "There will be.  You have plenty of experience and the war has just begun."

             
On the way back we were pushed onto the shoulder of the road several times by tank transporters crawling in the opposite direction.  By the time we got to the entrance to the city we had relaxed into the friendship and solidarity of people travelling together, away from roads leading to war.

             
All the same, I returned to Lisa in the days that followed.  Our meetings always ended in the usual place - on the quay.  Her attitude did not change.  Her sympathetic passivity and her readiness to be swept into behavior which may have been genuine or just a very professional imitation of the truth were stable and available.  But the taste of the experience was also limited and predictable.  That was the moment to expand things.  One evening I phoned Hannah from the office and said I would be home late.  Then I drew money out of the automatic cash machine and drove to the usual place.  When she sat down beside me I placed the bills on the dashboard, in front of her, and asked her to spend a few hours with me.  She agreed with a nod of her head and pushed the bills into her purse, as usual without counting them.

             
We had dinner at a remote spot.  Lisa talked about the prices of flats and things.  Her face flushed as she described a quarrel between neighbors.  I answered her briefly, unwillingly.  The lights were too dim, the waiters negligent, the band out of tune. 

             
After, as usual, we drove to the quay, made love and smoked cigarettes.  In the end we sat in the car, half-dressed, and looked at the moon, which was sinking into the sea, large and imperfect, like a sore eye.  I was tired and restless.  This was the moment when, in my previous job, I wanted to move on.  I rested my head on her lap, longing to feel her touch my hair.  Mechanically she put out her hand to bring me to a fresh erection.  It was not difficult. I was still aroused and she was practiced.  When I was in her my thoughts wandered to other places. 

             
"I can tell that you've got problems," she said.  "Is it your work?"

             
I said nothing.  There was something embarrassing and touching in her attempt to encourage me or, perhaps, to give me value for my money.  She brought my hand to her face.

"I know what work people do by the smell of their hands."  Her nostrils, as delicate as an animal's, sniffed my fingertips:  "You're a clerk..."

I shook my head in disagreement.

"Then what do you do?"

              "Materials," I said unwillingly.  "All kinds of materials..."

             
"A chemist or something like that?"

             
"Something like that."  I got out and threw the condom onto a gray pile floating in the water.  Nearby, a restaurant ship sailed slowly by.  The echoes of music aroused longings in me.  Further away, on the horizon, the masts of a pirate radio ship gleamed.  Lisa turned on the car radio and listened to the broadcast from the ship.  The music was soon replaced by a newscast.  A constant, recurring series of place names seemed to contain a message.  The war was in its sixth week then, and I was sorry that I had not been in at its birth.

             
I got back into the car and dressed quickly.  Lisa pulled her miniskirt down over her thighs and did up the buttons of her blouse.  Detached, gripped by the idea which had seized me, I drove wildly between damp crates and salt-eroded walls.  Lisa remained indifferent and quiet.  When we parted she kissed my cheek.  I sent her off with a quick caress of her hair.

             
The next day I sent a long letter to the Head.  He met with me in his room, beneath a picture of the Prime Minister, who watched us gravely.

"I know that there are opportunities now..." I said.

              "It's a war, Simon, we need soldiers."

             
"I'm a soldier."

             
"Of a different kind."