Cafe Nevo (5 page)

It was then David asked, “Would you care to tell me what happened?”

Ilana's recovery had progressed to the point of worrying about David's reaction. “I would if I could, but I can't,” she said almost gaily.

“You must have some idea. All that screaming.”

Until that moment it had not occurred to her that he might have seen more of the scene than her exit “How long were you there?” she asked.

“I saw the last act,” he said. “You were magnificent.”

She smiled. “Somewhat lacking in motivation, I fear. The last act is all there was.”

“That woman said there was provocation, some kind of incident. What happened? Was it—anti-Semitism?” He said the word with the coy thrill of a young boy whispering about sex.

“Someone said,
‘Juden,
'
“
she remembered.

He waited. “Is that all?”

“It upset me.”

“That was evident.”

“I've never liked coming to Germany.”

“Neither have I. And Frankfurt is particularly beastly. But still—”

“David, you were magnificent,” she interrupted, deliberately changing the subject but meaning it, too. “You saved my life, and I'll never, ever forget it. But, darling, what a scene!” She began to laugh, and he did, too, but not without an edge of alarm in his voice. Hearing it strengthened her resolve. When she said that she was going home, he protested but not too much. Ilana taxied to the airport the next morning.

David didn't call for two weeks. Ilana thought she'd lost him, deservedly. To avoid thinking about what had happened she brooded over the consequences: the very real possibility that she had damaged herself professionally. By involving David in a public scene which might easily have become a scandal, she had violated the strictest canons of her trade. The men she went with were serious men, solid, wealthy businessmen, not playboys who thrived on scandal. If David was harmed and word got about Ilana could find herself facing a career crisis.

David's belated but loving call, which should have relieved Ilana's anxiety, only exacerbated it by eliminating the cause without eliminating the effects. She knew her body as well as any athlete could, and knew now that it wasn't right. Moreover, the symptoms gave cause to suspect that this particular not-rightness was of a female order.

She waited a few more days, then called her doctor.

 

 

 

Chapter Three

 

“I am shocked,” said Caspi. “I am appalled. I always believed that for all your manifold faults you retained a modicum of style, if not decency. Suddenly I see that I am married to a stranger.”

“Then you are beginning to see the light.”
 

“But no, what am I saying? No stranger would behave as you did. No stranger would deliberately set out to embarrass me in public, making a fool of herself in the process. I don't know how you're going to face the world after this, Vered. Everybody's laughing at you.”

“At me?” she asked. “Do you think so?”
 

“You bitch.”

They sat at the kitchen counter, at right angles to one another. Caspi was dressed to go out; Vered wore a kimono over pajamas. They had an oblique way of talking, avoiding names and direct glances. Caspi harangued; Vered analyzed. “Anyway”—she shrugged— “you're exaggerating, as usual. You talk as if I'd stripped naked and strolled down Dizengoff, instead of just sitting for an hour in Nevo.”

“On a Friday afternoon, when you knew damn well I'd be there with Dory. That's exactly what you did: stripped naked for all the world to sneer.”

“Then it's strange that of the two of us, you're the one who feels humiliated.”

Caspi jumped up and threw his cup into the sink. It shattered. At the door he turned back. “If you think you will goad me into giving you a divorce, you're out of your mind. It will never happen.” He pulled open the door and stumbled into Jemima. “Damn you, woman, have you been listening at keyholes?”

“No need for that, Caspi. I could hear you down the block. Good morning, Vered.”

“Good morning, Mother.”

“If I'd known you were coming, Jemima, I'd have left an hour ago. As long as you're here, you might as well give your daughter a few lessons in decorum. She's just made a laughingstock of herself.”

“How very trying for you, model of decorum that you are.”

“Give little what's-her-name my best regards,” Vered called. Caspi slammed the door behind him.

“Coffee, Mother?” Vered said.

“Thank you.” Jemima took Caspi's place at the counter, crossing one elegant leg over the other. She wore a crisply tailored pearl-gray linen suit of her own design; her blond hair was gathered in a loose bun at the nape of her neck. While Vered silently cleaned up broken glass, Jemima cast a bleak eye about the room, pausing on the back of Vered's kimono and the proud set of the neck rising above it.

“Where's Daniel?” she asked.

“Playing at a friend's.” Vered prepared the percolator, set out the cups.

“I seem to have come at an inconvenient moment.”

“It makes no difference.”

“Are you wise to antagonize him?”

“No. But it doesn't matter.”

“What set him off?”

“I went to Nevo.”

“That's all?”

“Yesterday afternoon.”

“Friday afternoon. I see. And he was there.”

“Oh yes.

“You sat with him?”

Vered placed the percolator on the stove and rather slowly returned to the counter. She spoke with great detachment. “No, that seat was occupied.”

“Do you really think you'll win this game?”

“No.”

“Then why play it?”

Vered sat beside her mother. Her face was as expressionless as living flesh could be. “I've lost the battle anyway,” she said in a tone of perfect finality.

“Vered, I must tell you that I have never cared for your way of looking at me as if I were a census taker. I am your mother.”

“I know.”

“You don't act like it. Other daughters confide in their mothers. I wouldn't mind your reticence if I knew you talked to someone, a friend, a counselor, but I know you don't. I admire your fortitude but you go too far. The time has come to talk.”

“You'd like me to confide in you.”

“Yes.”

“Open my heart, pour out my troubles, seek solace and advice at your motherly bosom?”

Jemima's “Yes!” was nervous, defiant.

“What for? So you can tell your friends all about it? ‘Poor Vered, married to that monster. I warned her, but would she listen? Did you hear about his latest little floozy?'“

Eyes narrowed, Jemima put her hand on her heart and cried, “I wouldn't!”

“You did. All those years after Daddy died, when you called me your ugly duckling and laughed at me with your fancy society friends.”

“Oh, Vered, if I was ever so cruel I swear I'm paying for it now. No, don't look at me that way. You were a difficult child, Vered, and hard for me to understand. You still are. Darling, I
am
sorry.”

Vered's smile was bright but frigid. “It's all right, Mother. Would you like more coffee?”

“No.” Jemima fumbled in her bag for a handkerchief.

“Then I really have to get to work now. I've got a deadline tomorrow, and after this morning I'll have Daniel on my hands all day.”

Jemima dabbed delicately at her eyes, to avoid smearing her make-up. She said, “I won't go until I've had my say. When are you going to divorce this Caspi person?”

“I'm not going to.”

“Why not?” Jemima said angrily, mockingly. “Do you still love him?”

“Why do you ask? Do you still want him?”

Jemima gasped. “Do you really believe that?”

“No, I suppose not,” Vered said without inflection. Jemima, who needed glasses but was too vain to wear them, took a jeweled pair from her purse and set them on her nose. To no avail: the glasses had not been invented that would penetrate Vered's mask.

“You know,” she mused, “you've turned into a rather terrifying woman. I wouldn't wonder if Caspi were scared to death of you.”

Vered barked a laugh.

“I don't care if you bite my head off, Vered. I want to know: are you still in love with him?”

“I hate him,” she said.

Jemima was too pleased with the tone of this answer to reflect that the one emotion did not preclude the other. “Then for God's sake divorce him!” she cried.

“I can't.”

“Why not? You surely don't lack grounds.” As Jemima leaned toward her, Vered caught a whiff of her fragrance, a green, meadowy scent. “I'm seeing Giora Fliegerman this afternoon.”

“Forget it. I already talked to him.”

“You did? He didn't tell me that.”

“That is surprising.”

“Don't be rude. What did he say?”

“He said what all the others said: that I could get a divorce. No problem.”

“But that's excellent.”

Vered toyed with her cup. “He just wasn't sure I could keep Daniel.”

Jemima said angrily, ‘‘That's absurd. You must be looking for excuses. Caspi would never contest custody.”

“Oh, no?”

“Of course not. What would Caspi do with a three-year-old child?”

“Look after him, he said, as best he could.”

Jemima pushed her cup away and stood up. She prowled about the small kitchen like a well-dressed, impeccably groomed panther. Vered lit a cigarette. Her last words, spoken with Caspi's intonation, reverberated in the silent kitchen.

“He's bluffing,” Jemima said at last. “He doesn't want the child, and even if he did, no judge would award him custody.”

“If Caspi contested custody he'd be more likely than I to win it All things being equal, the judges and the law favor the father for boys.”

“But all things aren't equal. Caspi's got no relationship with the boy. He's a bully, a womanizer, a—”

Vered's cool voice cut in firmly. “I know what Caspi is. Do you know what the Fliegerman creature said?”

“What?”

“He sat down next to me and put his band on my knee. He was wearing some tacky men's cologne and that ratty toupee. He said, ‘Be realistic, Vered. I've known a few women in my day; does that make me an unfit father?'“
 

“Why, that arrogant little—”
 

“He's right. They all cheat on their wives; they'd never penalize another man for that.”

Jemima shook her head and sighed. “Well,” she said after a moment, “I'd call him on it.”

“You would, would you?” It was not said admiringly.
 

“Darling, take my word for it, it's a bluff. Caspi never wanted a child to begin with. He wouldn't know what to do with Daniel if he got him.”

“He'd know.” Vered lit a cigarette and gave one to her mother. A look passed between the two women: a question, an answer, a judgment? Perhaps something different for each; it was not a look of perfect understanding. Vered said deliberately, “Caspi loves his power over me. With Daniel in his custody there'd be that much more to love.”

Jemima slapped the counter top smartly. “That's defeatist thinking. You've got to keep in mind that every problem has at least one possible solution. You're your own worst enemy, Vered; I've been wanting to tell you that for a long time. You analyze instead of acting. Where would I be today if I'd spent my time understanding my problems instead of doing something about them? Beware, my girl. I've known better women than you to grow addicted to their misery. Ask yourself one question: if you're so smart, what are you doing married to that bum?”

Later that afternoon, Jemima sat at the white bamboo and glass desk in her study, unanswered letters strewn before her. She twirled a pen and stared idly out the window at the sea below. Vered, too, was at her desk, which was a sturdy, graceless oak creation, with many drawers and cubbyholes. Daniel was down for his nap, and she had two precious hours to work. There was a blank sheet of paper in the typewriter in front of her. She stared at it as if hypnotized, hands at her side. Both women, mother and daughter, were remembering the same events, though from very different perspectives.

 

When Caspi first appeared in their lives, there was some regrettable confusion as to where his primary interest lay. Vered was nineteen at the time, Jemima forty and a widow for seven years. Caspi, who had just turned thirty, was being hailed by the critics as the new star on the Israeli literary firmament. When he first came to one of Jemima's salons, produced as a kind of hostess gift by his publisher, Vered was in attendance. A striking but rather awkward sort of girl, not long out of army uniform, with none of her mother's flair or style, Vered regarded these evenings as a kind of penance incurred by her weakness in returning to her mother's house, and thus was not surprised to find herself ignored by the first interesting man she'd met in that house. Instead of noticing the daughter, Caspi wooed the mother with smoldering across-a-crowded-room glances.