Wherever You Go by Joan Leegant

Author:Joan Leegant
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2010-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

His name was Eyal and he’d lived there for two years. “Varda gets a shitload of mail,” he said, handing Yona the stack. The neighbor with the key had to go out so he’d given it to Eyal. “Art magazines, catalogs. A fortune in postage.”

They stepped inside. Tomato red walls, wooden masks over the couch, prints and pastels and sketches, an explosion of greenery on the living room balcony. “She’s a sculptor, Varda. But she keeps no work here,” Eyal said. “Too big. She has a studio in Ein Kerem. Iron, bronze, I don’t know what else. Very modern.”

He went to the kitchen with a watering can, and Yona moved through the flat, stopping at the bedroom doorway. A neatly made double bed, a teak wardrobe, more colorful art. That summer, she’d walked to the old professor’s flat in Rehavia each morning, and in the afternoons strolled the city or swum in the pool at Ramat Rachel. David studied while she was out, his bar review notes covering the little dining table so they ate on the balcony and watched the street, cheap meals of soft pita and fresh hummus and eggplant salad, the best plums and figs she’d ever tasted. They had tried so hard, she to shake the guilt, David to make her love him. He took her on trips to the beach where the misty salt air prickled their faces, and to the little vacation cabins up north for the mountain air and spectacular views and fresh goat milk, where you could get a deal if you showed up at the last minute and spoke to the owners in your American-accented Hebrew; they seemed so moved that you’d taken the trouble to learn their isolated lonely language. She’d wanted desperately to feel what David wanted her to feel, what she also wanted to feel; for it to be a violently inevitable romance, like from a play or a novel, the kind of passion kings gave up their thrones for and heiresses turned away inheritances for. Because that would have made it worth the cost. But she couldn’t will any such thing into being. She couldn’t love David. She was just a girl, barely out of adolescence, aching for her lost parents, her cold and angry sister, taking whatever affection she could, where she could.

She drifted back into the living room. Eyal was finishing with the plants.

“Seen enough?” he said. He’d swept through the rooms with the watering can, collecting dead leaves, adjusting the shutters, making sure no one had tampered with the window locks, theft, even on the second floor, he’d said, shaking his head, rampant.

“Thank you, quite enough,” she said, and followed him out. She was glad to be going. She didn’t want to return.

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