The Nimrod Flipout: Stories (9 page)

Outside, the sun’s shining, and downstairs on the lawn, my girlfriend’s naked. June twenty-first, the longest day of the year. People walking past our building look at her, some even find a reason to stop—they have to tie their shoelaces, let’s say, or they stepped on some shit and absolutely have to scrape it off their shoes this very instant. But some of them stop without an excuse, real straight-shooters. Before, one of them even whistled, but my girlfriend didn’t notice because she’d just come to a gripping passage in her book. And the guy who whistled waited for a second, but when he saw her keep on reading, he left. She reads a lot, my girlfriend, but never like that, outside, naked. And I’m sitting on our balcony on the third floor, front, trying to figure out how I feel about it. I’m a little off when it comes to that knowing-how-I-feel thing. Sometimes, friends come over on Saturday night and get all worked up, arguing about all kinds of things. Once, someone even got up in the middle, mad as hell, and went home. And I just sit there with them and watch TV with the sound off and read the subtitles. Sometimes, in the heat of an argument, someone may ask me what I think. And then, most of the time, I pretend like I’m thinking, finding it hard to put my thoughts into words, and there’s always someone who takes advantage of the silence to jump in with his two cents.

But there, we’re talking about more general subjects, politics and stuff, and here, this is my girlfriend we’re talking about, and she’s naked. Really, I tell myself, I should know how I feel about that. Now the Elizovs come out the front door where the intercom is. The Elizovs live two floors above us, the penthouse. The man’s very old, maybe a hundred. I don’t even know his first name, just that it starts with an “S,” and that he’s an engineer, because next to their regular mailbox there’s another one, bigger, that has S. Elizov, Engineer, written on it, and it can’t be her, because our neighbor across the hall once told me that she’s a customs inspector. She’s no spring chicken either, Mrs. Elizov, and her blond hair is right out of a bottle. The first time we rode in the elevator with them, my girlfriend was sure she was a call girl because her perfume had a smell kind of like detergent. The Elizovs stop and look at my girlfriend naked on the lawn. They’re the two most influential people on the tenants’ committee. The climbing vine on the fence, for example, was their idea. Mr. Elizov whispers something into his wife’s ear, she shrugs, and they keep on walking. My girlfriend doesn’t even notice them go past her, she’s so caught up in her book, so engrossed. And what I feel, if I really try to put it into words, is that it’s great that she’s getting a tan, because when she’s tan, it makes the green of her eyes stand out. And if she’s going to get a tan, then the best way is naked, because if there’s one thing I hate, it’s those bathing-suit strap marks, when everything’s dark and all of a sudden, white. It always makes you feel that it’s not even the same skin, that it’s some synthetic thing you buy at Club Med. On the other hand, it’s not such a good idea to piss off the Elizovs. Because we’re only renting the place and we do have the option to stay for two years, but still. If they start saying we’re causing problems, the landlord could throw us out with sixty days’ notice. It says so in the lease. Even though that on-the-other-hand has nothing to do with anybody’s feelings on the subject, definitely not mine, it’s more like a kind of risk we have to consider. My girlfriend’s turning on her back now. Her ass is my absolute favorite, but her tits are something too. A kid going by on his Rollerblades yells at her, “Hey, lady, your cunt is showing!” As if she didn’t know. My brother once said she’s the kind of girl who doesn’t stay in one place very long, and I should be prepared so she won’t break my heart. That was a long time ago, I think, almost two years. And when that guy down there whistled at her, all of a sudden I remembered that, and for a second, I was scared she’d get up and leave.

The sun’ll be going down soon, and she’ll come back inside. Because there won’t be any more light for sunbathing, or for reading either. And when she does come in, I’ll slice us some watermelon and we’ll eat it on the balcony, together. If she comes up soon, maybe we’ll even get to see the sunset.

Two guys are sitting together in a bar. One of them is majoring in something or other in college, the other abuses his guitar once a day and thinks he’s a musician. They’ve already had two beers, and they’re planning to have at least two more. The college guy just happens to be depressed because he’s in love with his roommate, and the roommate has a hairy-necked boyfriend who sleeps over at their apartment every night, and in the morning, when they accidentally bump into each other in the kitchen, he makes you-have-my-sympathy faces at the college guy, and that only depresses him more. “Move out,” the guy who thinks he’s a musician tells him—this musician guy, he has a history of avoiding conflict. All of a sudden, in the middle of the conversation, some drunk with a ponytail they’ve never seen before comes in and asks the college student if he’d bet a hundred shekels that he can put his friend, the musician, into a bottle. The college guy says yes right away, because, really, the bet sounds pretty dumb, and in a second, the ponytail puts the musician into an empty Carlsberg bottle. The college guy doesn’t have much money to spare, but fair is fair, he takes out the hundred shekels, pays up, and goes back to staring at the wall and feeling sorry for himself. “Tell him,” his friend shouts from the bottle. “Come on, quick, before he goes.” “Tell him what?” the college guy asks. “To get me out of the bottle now, come on,” but by the time the college guy gets the message, the ponytail has split. So he pays, takes his best friend in the bottle, hails a cab, and together, they go looking for the ponytail. One thing’s for sure, that ponytail didn’t look like someone who got drunk by mistake; he’s a pro. So they go from bar to bar. And at each one, they have another drink, so they won’t feel like they wasted their time. The college guy downs them in a single gulp, and the more he drinks, the sorrier he feels for himself. The guy in the bottle drinks through a straw. It’s not as if he has too many options.

At five in the morning, when they find the ponytail in a bar near the beach, they’re both wasted. The ponytail is wasted too, and he feels really bad about the bottle thing. Right away, he says he’s sorry and takes the musician out of the bottle. He’s really embarrassed about forgetting the guy inside, so he buys another round for them, their last. They talk a little, and the ponytail tells them that he learned the bottle trick from a Finnish guy he met in Thailand. It turns out that in Finland that trick is considered kid stuff. And ever since, every time the ponytail goes out drinking and is stuck without cash, he gets hold of some by betting. And the ponytail even teaches them how to do the trick, that’s how bad he feels. The truth? Once you catch on, you’re amazed how easy it is.

By the time the college guy gets home, the sun is almost up. And before he can even try to get his key in the lock, the door opens, and there’s hairy-neck, standing in front of him, all showered and shaved. Before hairy-neck starts to go down the stairs, he manages to toss his girlfriend’s drunk roommate an I-know-you-went-out-to-get-crocked-only-because-of-her look. And the college guy crawls quietly to his room, managing to get a peek at his roommate—Sivan, that’s her name—sleeping under the covers in her room with her mouth half open, like a baby. She has this special kind of beauty now, serene. The kind of beauty people have only when they’re sleeping, but not all of them. And for a minute, he feels like taking her, just the way she is, putting her in a bottle and keeping her next to his bed, like those bottles of multicolored sand people used to bring back from the Sinai. Like the small night-lights you keep on for kids who are afraid to sleep alone in the dark.

When we landed in Tel Aviv, the whole airplane burst into applause and I started to cry. My father, who was sitting in the aisle seat, tried to calm me down, and at the same time, explain to anyone who was polite enough to listen that this was the first time I’d ever flown abroad, and that’s why I was a little emotional. “When we took off, she was actually fine,” he blabbered to an old man with Coke-bottle glasses who stank of piss, “and now, after landing, all of a sudden she’s letting it out.” In the same breath, he put a hand on the back of my neck, the way you do with a dog, and whispered in a syrupy voice, “Don’t cry, sweetie, Daddy’s here.” I wanted to kill him, I wanted to hit him so hard he’d bleed. But Daddy kept on kneading the back of my neck, whispering loudly to the smelly old man that I’m not usually like this, and that I’d been an artillery instructor in the army, and that my boyfriend, Giora, how ironic, is even a security officer for El Al.

A week before, when I landed in New York, my boyfriend, Giora, how ironic, was waiting for me with flowers right at the door of the plane. He works at the airport, so that was easy to arrange. We kissed on the steps, like in some Hallmark movie, and he whisked me and my suitcases through passport control in a second. From the airport, we drove straight to a restaurant that overlooks all of Manhattan. He’d bought an ’88 Cadillac, but it was so clean it looked new. In the restaurant, Giora didn’t really know what to order, and we finally settled on something with a funny name that looked a little like an octopus and smelled awful. Giora tried to eat it and to say it was good, but after a few seconds, he gave up too, and we both started laughing. He’d grown a beard since I saw him last, and it actually looked good on him. From the restaurant, we went to the Statue of Liberty and MoMA, and I pretended to love it, but I had this weird feeling the whole time. I mean, we hadn’t seen each other for more than two months, and instead of going to his place and fucking or just sitting and talking a little, we’re schlepping around to these tourist attractions that Giora must have seen at least two hundred times, and he’s giving me these tired explanations of every single one. In the evening, when we got to his apartment, he said he had a phone call to make, and I went to take a shower. I was still drying myself off, and he’d already cooked a pot of spaghetti and set the table with wine and the half-dead flowers. I really wanted us to talk. I don’t know, I had this feeling that something bad had happened and he didn’t want to tell me, like in those movies when someone dies and they try to hide it from the children. But Giora kept yakking away about all the places he had to show me in a week, about how he was afraid we wouldn’t see them all because the city’s so big, and it isn’t really a week, barely five days, because one day was over already and on the last day, I was flying in the evening, and my father was coming into town before that, so we definitely couldn’t do anything. I stopped him with a kiss; I couldn’t think of any other way. The bristles of his beard scratched my face a little. “Giora,” I asked, “is everything all right?” “Sure,” he said, “sure, it’s just that we have so little time, and I’m afraid we won’t get to see anything.”

The spaghetti was actually very good, and after we fucked, we sat on the balcony, drank some wine, and looked at all the teeny-tiny people walking past on the street. I said to Giora that it must be really exciting to live in such a huge city, that I could sit on the balcony like that for hours just watching all those little dots below, trying to guess what they were thinking about. And Giora said, “You get used to it,” and went to get himself a Diet Coke. “You know,” he said, “only last night I was about ten blocks west of here, where all the hookers are. You can’t see it from here, it’s on the other side of the building. And some older homeless guy comes up to the car—he actually looked okay for a homeless guy. His clothes were old and everything, and he had one of those supermarket carts full of paper bags, the kind they always drag around from place to place, but except for that, he looked completely sane, sort of clean. It’s hard to explain. And that homeless guy came up to me and offered to give me a blow job for ten bucks. ‘I’ll do it real good,’ he said to me. ‘I’ll swallow every drop.’ And all in a kind of businesslike tone, like someone offering to sell you a TV. I didn’t know what to do with myself. You know, two in the morning, a line of twenty Puerto Rican hookers standing twenty yards from him, some of them really pretty, and this guy, who looks exactly like my uncle, is offering to give me a blow job. Then it hit him too, it must have been the first time he’d ever offered to do such a thing, and all of a sudden, we were both embarrassed. And he said to me, half apologizing, ‘So maybe I can wash your car instead? Five bucks. I’m really hungry.’ And that’s how I found myself in the grungiest part of Manhattan, two in the morning, a guy about forty washing my car with a bottle of mineral water and a rag that used to be a Chicago Bulls T-shirt. Some of the hookers started walking toward us, and a black guy too, who looked like their pimp, and I was sure things were going to get ugly, but none of them said a word. They just looked at us without saying anything. And when the guy finished, I said thank you, paid, and drove away.”

Neither of us said anything after that story. I looked at the sky, and it seemed very black all of a sudden. I asked him what he was doing on a street of hookers in the middle of the night, and he said that wasn’t the point. I asked him if he had someone, and he didn’t answer that either. I asked him if she was a hooker. At first, he didn’t say anything, then he said she worked for Lufthansa. Now I could suddenly sense her smell on him, coming from his body, his beard. A little like the smell of sauerkraut, and now, after we’d fucked, that smell was clinging to me too. He insisted that I stay in his apartment for the week anyway, and I immediately said yes; I didn’t have much choice. There was only one bed, and I didn’t want to be a bitch, so we slept in it together, but we didn’t have sex. I knew I would never fuck him again, and he knew it too. After he fell asleep, I went to take another shower, to wash her smell off me, even though I knew that as long as I slept in the same bed with him, the smell would linger.

On the day of the flight, I wore my nicest clothes so Giora would get a little taste of what he was missing, but I don’t think he even noticed. I was really happy when we went to meet my father at the hotel. I gave him a big hug, and that surprised him a little, but you could see how happy he was. My father asked Giora a few stupid questions, and Giora squirmed a little, saying he had somewhere he needed to go, and he was sorry he couldn’t drive us to the airport. Then he went to get my suitcases from the car and as we said goodbye and pretended to kiss, my father couldn’t tell anything was wrong. When Giora was gone, I went up to my father’s room and showered again, and my father called for a cab to take us to the airport. During the flight, I was very quiet, and he talked the whole time. That week had passed so slowly for me, and to cheer myself up, I’d tell myself this was my last Monday here, or my last Tuesday, just like I did in the last week of basic training, only this time it didn’t really help. And even now, with the nightmare finally over, I didn’t feel any relief. Even the smell of her was still there. I sniffed myself, trying to figure out where it was coming from, and suddenly I realized it was from my watch. Her smell had stayed on my watch from the very first night.

After the meal, my father pretended he was going to the bathroom and came back with a flight attendant. That’s when it dawned on me that he’d arranged a surprise visit to the cockpit. I was such a wreck I didn’t even have the strength to argue with him. I dragged myself behind the flight attendant to the cockpit, where the pilot and the navigator explained all kinds of boring things to me about the instruments and the switches. Finally, the pilot, who had gray hair, asked how old I was, and the navigator burst out laughing. The pilot gave him a murderous look, and he stopped and apologized. “I didn’t mean anything,” he said. “I’m just used to, you know, mostly kids coming in here.” The pilot said that, in any case, it was very nice of me to visit them in the cockpit and asked if I’d had a good time in New York. I said yes. The pilot said he was crazy about that city, because it had everything. And the navigator, who probably felt a little uncomfortable and wanted to say something too, said that he personally had a little problem with the poverty you see there, but today, with all the Russian immigrants, you actually see it in Israel too. After that, they asked me if I’d gotten to eat in that new restaurant that overlooks all of Manhattan, and I said yes. When I went back, my father was beaming and he changed places with me so I could see the landing better. As I tried to push my seat into a reclining position, he rubbed the back of my hand and said, “Sweetheart, the red light’s on, you’d better fasten your seat belt. We’re going to land in a jiffy.” And I fastened my seat belt real tight and felt how, in a jiffy, I was going to cry.