Cafe Nevo (6 page)

Caspi's infamy with women had preceded, perhaps even contributed to, his literary fame. He was known to be arrogant, unprincipled in the means and targets of his seductions, and cruel to the women he used and discarded. This reputation naturally had the effect of inducing otherwise quite sensible women to try to capture Caspi's heart.

The day after her soiree, Jemima went out and bought both of Caspi's books. She read them and wrote a note to Caspi, inviting him to dine next Friday. He came. They dined tête-à-tête but for Vered, whose presence was barely felt. Later they walked through the garden and looked down on the sea. Jasmine and brine mingled in the air. Jemima held Caspi's arm and laughed deep in her throat, while Vered trailed behind, a silent shadow. Jemima gave Vered several looks, but she ignored them and was at last rewarded for her tenacity: behind her mother's back, Caspi plucked a red rose from a bush and presented it to her.

Vered was scarcely to be seen the next week, coming and going without a word of explanation. Jemima wondered about this. Saturday morning after breakfast, she brought one of Caspi's books out to the garden and offered it to her daughter.

“No, thanks,” Vered said. “I have a copy. Caspi gave it to me.”

“Caspi
gave it to you! When did you see Caspi?”

“Yesterday, at Nevo.” Vered lay on a towel in her bikini; her olive skin tanned deeply. Jemima, in a sundress, sat beside her in a wicker chair. The house was set on a bluff overlooking the sea in Herzliya, a prime piece of property which Jemima had fought long and hard to keep. She said: “Vered, I do not want you hanging around Nevo. A young girl in that place is regarded as nothing but a piece of fresh meat by those hungry dogs.”

“They are nothing like that, Mother. They happen to be the most interesting people in the country today, the best artists, actors, and writers around.”

“If they were that good they'd be working,” Jemima snapped. “Nobody with any serious work to do hangs out in cafés.”

“Creative people work in short, intensive bursts,” Vered informed her loftily. “They need to escape periodically. That's why so many of them drink.”

“I don't like the sound of this.” Jemima turned her chair toward her daughter, lowering the rim of her straw hat to block the sun from her eyes. “Have you been seeing Caspi?”

“Just a little,” Vered said demurely, but the look she shot her mother from under lowered lids was gleefully defiant.

Jemima leaned back, clasped her hands, and smiled understanding. “I can understand the attraction, Vered. But I cannot consider Caspi a suitable companion for a young girl.”

“Why not? You invited him here to dinner.”

“That is different—and it is not for you, young lady, to question your mother. For your information, a person of my age and experience has resources that a girl your age lacks. Caspi is nothing but an amusing acquaintance to me; to you he could be dangerous.”

If Jemima knew how she was fueling her daughter's curiosity and resolve she would certainly have desisted, but as she considered her daughter incapable of any serious opposition she took no account of such a possibility. Vered exclaimed, “Caspi hasn't made a pass at me, if that's what you think. And you know what? I'm sorry he hasn't.”

 

Jemima called Caspi and arranged a meeting. He wouldn't come to Herzliya, so she agreed to attend him at Nevo.

“A charming child,” Caspi said.

“Child is the operant word. I trust you bear that in mind.”

Caspi laughed heartily. “Pedophilia is not among my virtues,” he said in an audible whisper. “Let the girl come to me in ten years' time, if she's willing. Then she may interest me. I prefer seasoned women.” The smile he gave Jemima was full of meaning, and despite herself, she felt a tingle in the pit of her stomach.

“She said you are a child,” Caspi told Vered an hour later.

“Am I?”

“I don't think so.” Caspi ran two fingers up her bare arm. “Do you?”

“Of course she's a child,” said Sternholz, bustling over. “You could be her father, God forbid.”

“Sternholz, go away,” Caspi said.

“You want something, little girl? Some milk maybe I should bring you?”

“I'll have a rum and Coke.”

“We don't serve mixed drinks.”

“Then just the rum.”

She got just the Coke.

“Are you a virgin?” Caspi asked when Sternholz had gone away. “I ask purely out of fatherly interest.”

“If that is your interest, then it's none of your business.”

“So, the little kitten has claws! How very charming.
Garçon!
Beer, and another Coke for the lady.”

“I'll
garçon
you,” Sternholz muttered, coming over with the drinks. “And shouldn't you be in school, Vered? Does your mother know where you are?”

“No, and no,” said Vered.

“There's Dotan. Rami, come here!”

“Hello, Caspi.”

“Sit down. This is Vered Niro. Be careful—she scratches.”

“Hello, hello.”

“I saw you published Oz's latest thing. I read thirty pages and put it down as trash, but Vered finished it and says it has some redeeming value.”

“It's doing very well; we're already reprinting.”

“Yes, but what's happened to the Oz we all knew and loved? Compare this last one to
My Michael!”

“My Michael
sold maybe thirty thousand. I'll be surprised if we don't top that. What's so funny?”

“Vered, don't ever try to talk books with a publisher. All you get back are numbers.”

“And royalties,” Dotan said.

“Eventually, sometimes.”

 

“Well, Vered,” Jemima said at breakfast the next morning, “I hardly see you these days. We have a lot of things to do before school starts. You still haven't registered in the business faculty. And you need clothes. You'll have to come into the place and get fitted up.”

“I don't need any clothes.”

“You certainly do. Jeans and old work shirts may be all the mode at Nevo, but for the university you need to dress decently. Don't forget that you are my daughter, and your present manner of dressing hardly reflects well on me.”

“I'm not taking business, Mother. I've decided to major in literature.”

“Literature,” Jemima said darkly, “is not a profession. Nor will it prepare you in any way for a responsible position in the firm. I should think you might have learned from my example the folly of a woman's not having a profession. Read books, by all means, but don't let them interfere with your life.”

“And I'll minor in journalism. You see, I do care about having a profession. After I graduate, I'll get a job on a paper. I've been meeting people who can help.”

“What people? Where?”

“Writers, critics, journalists, all kinds of people. At Nevo.”

Jemima rose to her full five feet seven inches. “That was
not
the plan! I have one daughter, and she must succeed me.”

“She doesn't want to,” Vered said.

“Child, what has got into you? You've never acted like this before.”

“I never knew I could.”

 

“You're encouraging her,” Jemima said wrathfully. She stood over Caspi. Sternholz hovered behind, wringing his hands. At the tables around them, people listened openly. ‘‘You are deliberately trying to drive a wedge between us.”

“You need a wedge between you. It is my privilege to be of service. Do sit down, Jemima. You're embarrassing me. That's better. Now what will you have?
Garçon!”

Sternholz stepped forward. “You call me that once more, Caspi, and you can find yourself another parking spot. You want something, Jemima?”

“Emmanuel, I have a bone to pick with you. What do you mean by letting Vered hang out here with this riffraff?”

“I don't like it, Jemima, but what could I do? She's a grown woman, and this is a public place.”

Jemima glanced around the café at all the occupied chairs angled toward her table. She felt as if she were appearing in a theater-in-the-round. “A very public place,” she said.

“You have misinterpreted the entire situation,” Caspi informed her and the world at large. “Vered is a treasure, which you, my dear Jemima, do not sufficiently value. Vered's innocence is delectable; I envy you her rebellion. She is a late-blooming rose, and all the sweeter for it.”

“She
is
innocent,” Jemima said, “and that is what makes your behavior so despicable.”

“My behavior, madam, has been impeccable, to her and to you. My attitude toward Vered is that of a kindly father, a role in keeping with the feelings I harbor toward you.”

“I am sorry for the day I met you,” Jemima said.

As she wove her way out through the tables, Jemima heard one Nevo wit say: “Caspi means to reverse nature. He's going to wed the younger and bed the elder.” A burst of raucous laughter followed her onto the street.

 

No one ever really understood why Caspi married Vered. The odds were on the mother: she had more to give. There were people who guessed that Caspi's flirtation with Vered was a ploy to force Jemima's hand: take him on herself, or lose her daughter to him. Others said it was merely a joke that went too far. Jemima saw it as a demonic act of destruction. All noted the fact that though impecunious herself, Vered was her mother's sole heir and thus heir to Niro Fashions. Caspi himself gave a thousand reasons, which amounted to none. Most often he claimed that he married Vered because she was a virgin, but that was nonsense, as he'd already dispatched a dozen of those. Vered was amazed to find herself favored over the many women who'd been linked to Caspi in the past. That part of her which fit her mother's conception, sly, awkward, worrisome Vered, could not account for it at all.

But there was another Vered, Vered-seen-through- Caspi's-eyes, and that was a self she would do much to secure. Caspi saw in Vered a canny innocence and the gift of clear sight coupled with the rarer gift of clear expression. He saw a bravery of spirit. He saw a woman unawakened, who stirred under his touch, and he saw himself as both creator and discoverer. The truth was stranger than all the imaginings. Only Sternholz, of all the witnesses to Caspi's strange courtship, had an inkling, and that insight did not cheer him. For the first and only time in his life, Caspi had fallen in love.

 

 

 

Chapter Four

 

Sarita Blume lived at No. 34 Sheinkin Street in a flat laughingly styled “the penthouse.' The apartment was a one-room shack on the flat roof of a three-story building. In the winter, when it rained, the roof flooded and water sluiced over the cement floors. The ceiling leaked, the electrical wiring was dangerously eroded, and there was no water pressure, just the meanest trickle of water from the faucets. The rent, however, was only $100 a month. Sarita deplored the miserliness of the landlord which had brought the apartment to such a state, but for herself, it didn't matter. What mattered were the height, the lights and the place itself.

Sheinkin was the heart of little Tel Aviv, which was the heart of greater Tel Aviv, which was the heart, the brain, the gut of Israel. On Sheinkin you found every type of Israeli all jumbled together: old pensionnaires, who gathered in the bridge club or ran one of the little key-money shops; religious families with dozens of kids; artists and musicians driven out of the north by the prices; refugee kibbutzniks still living in groups; young couples with a baby or two, waiting for a break on the stock market or the national lottery to buy their way up and out. The shops were tiny and graceless and stuffed with merchandise of every imaginable kind for half of what the goods cost anywhere else. You could gut an apartment, reconstruct it, paint
it, light it, install new plumbing, furnish, decorate and drape it, stock the pantry with food and the cupboards with clothes and shoes and hats, all without ever going off the street. Alone on her roof, Sarita overlooked the world, and what she saw she painted.

Two months before her first appearance in Nevo, Sarita Blume was sitting where she usually sat and doing what she usually did, painting a scene from Sheinkin Street. From her vantage point on the roof she could see all of Sheinkin spread out below her, from its splendid head, which butted into Rothschild Boulevard, to the bedraggled tail, which wagged into Allenby. It was
10:00 A.M., and the morning sun swept over the stately buildings of Rothschild to illuminate her street. As she sketched blindly, Sarita followed the progress of an old woman, bent almost double, who trundled a two-wheeled shopping cart from grocery to fruit stand to pharmacy to butcher. Two mothers pushed strollers with bags laden from the morning's shopping slung over the handles. When they paused for a traffic light, the old Gruzini flower seller, who (as far as Sarita could tell) lived in a doorway on the corner of Achad Ha'am, left his place to peer at the babies. They laughed at his funny woven cap and grizzly beard, and he handed each one a daisy to hold or eat as they saw fit. The Arab street cleaner was making his stately rounds, trailed by a pack of barking mongrels that pretended not to know him. A tall woman in a fiery red bandana crossed the street and entered Sarita's building.