“He doesn’t live there anymore.”
“Or a different neighbor.”
“You sure?”
“Ask a contractor or architect, why me?”
“You planned the renovations.”
“That’s why I know what I’m talking about.”
“So what then?”
“Why tear down walls when all you have to do is reduce the chaos you’ve created here?”
“How?”
“Move the piano near the window, with the wing in the corner.”
“It won’t fit in the corner, there’s not enough room.”
“Says who?”
“That’s where the armchair goes.”
“Which one?”
“The pink one.”
“What’s it doing there?”
“It has sheet music on it.”
“Let’s remove it from there, and you’ll see that the corner will be happy to accommodate the entire back of the piano. There’s all this space going to waste.”
“Wait a second. It’s hard for Hanan to write music facing the window, the view distracts him and takes him where he doesn’t want to go. He writes, you know, very abstract music. Not romantic.”
“So he should close the window and shut the blinds.”
“He won’t have air.”
“He should write his music blindfolded.”
“You just want to find fault.”
“No, but I am curious about the self-indulgence.”
“It’s not self-indulgence. It’s art.”
“I’m also an artist, and I was never self-indulgent.”
“True, in that sense you were an easier husband.”
“So listen to me now too. In the living room, the solution is fairly simple. Your chaos makes me furious. I got so dizzy in your kitchen, I can still feel it.”
“You’re exaggerating.”
“I’m not. When I left, the place was orderly. Now it’s this insane warehouse.”
“Because you didn’t teach me how to be neat.”
“Teach? You didn’t want to learn. You relied on me for everything.”
“Because you didn’t force me to be neat.”
“Was that possible?”
“Not force. But educate. You didn’t have the patience to educate me.”
“That’s true. I loved you too much, so I gave in to all your weaknesses.”
“So do you have an idea how to restore order?”
“Come, give me a hand. We have a chance since he’s not here. And believe me, I’m doing it for you. For some reason I still have a little bit of love for you.”
She blushes with an old, dreamy smile; she knows that he still loves her. She gets up to help him remove the computer and printer from the dining table, collect the cables, move the stack of musical scores from the armchair to the bedroom, and return the chair to its former place. He then releases the piano’s brakes and rolls it toward the window, carefully easing the closed wing deep into the corner, and on his initiative, without asking the owner, he places a vase on top to create, in his words, a melodious nook.
Her face is flushed now from the joint effort and the physical closeness with her former husband. And she is amazed how, with simple common sense and without tearing down a wall, he has successfully retrieved some of the beauty and order of the living room. “Don’t worry,” he says, “Hanan will get used to his piano’s new location. And in general,” he sermonizes, “artists who agonize and think that if they pamper their muse she will repay the kindness don’t understand that serious muses hate indulgence and self-indulgence.”
“Hanan is not self-indulgent,” she insists, defending the husband who is three years her junior. “He’s just in a difficult period.”
“In my difficult periods, I did not create this kind of chaos all around me.”
She looks down. “You did worse things,” she whispers, as if to herself.
“It only seemed that way to you, because you didn’t understand that a director is different from artists who work alone. He has personal responsibility to the characters realized in his work.”
“She was not a character,” she mutters, “she was a woman. But let’s drop it now, please. So many years have passed.”
“Yes, years have passed.”
And he remembers how this refined and fragile woman tried to hit him when he admitted he had betrayed her and how he forced her to make love, but it was the last time.
“You want me to help you straighten out the kitchen?”
“No,” she says nervously. “You’ve done enough. Thanks.”
Silence. He knows she would be grateful if he left her alone, but settled now in the pink armchair, the stack of music gone, he finds it hard to go.
“Even though so many years have passed,” he says, “you’d be surprised to hear that I sometimes dream about you. Perhaps hoping that, if not in reality, then in a dream, you’ll finally be able to understand what my art is about.”
“You still dream about me?” She sounds concerned.
“Once in a while.”
“And what do you dream? What are you doing to me in your dream?”
“I am not doing anything, just looking. This morning, after I heard your voicemail, you suddenly appeared to me in a little dream, that’s why I agreed to come here.”
“What did you dream?”
“That you were going down the stairs, a lot of stairs.”
“Where?”
“I can’t remember, but stairs, as you know, are not just stairs but also an erotic symbol, one that I sometimes use in a film when I want to tighten the bond between the hero and the heroine.”
“First time I’ve heard such a theory.”
“It’s true, ask Hanan. If he’s an intellectual, he’s surely heard of it. But don’t worry, in my dream you weren’t alone. You were with Aunt Sonia, so nothing very erotic could be going on.”
“Aunt Sonia?” She giggles like a child. “Nice that you brought her into your dream too.”
“I didn’t bring her, she came on her own, and not in a wheelchair — you both walked down slowly, you supported her and took care of her, and I was behind watching carefully, so if she fell I would catch her.”
“At least in dreams you are a generous person.”
“But now, telling it to you, I think I understand the dream. I think I brought her to protect you from the yearning I still feel for you. A pure and noble longing for, say, the big, beautiful birthmark on the back of your neck, above the spine. You couldn’t see it, so I had to bring you news of it now and then.”
Her eyes are closed. She sighs. Her face is weary. Wrinkles unfamiliar to him have been added in the years he hasn’t seen her. But when she speaks there’s a soft irony in her voice.
“I see that you still can’t get away from the retrospective.”
“Maybe. Is that a sin?”
“No sin. But you promised you would restrain yourself.”
“I’m not restrained?”
“Not really. The retrospective is still affecting you.”
She speaks without anger, without fear, relaxed and calm, her legs resting on the coffee table. She seems no longer in a hurry to have him leave.
And the sting of separation pierces his heart once more, he rises from the armchair, not heading for the door but approaching her, and he asks, with a smile, “I’m not entitled to a little reward for moving your piano and finding room for the wing and reducing your chaos?” She eyes him with gratitude. “What if for a second I took another look at your beauty mark, the one that you can’t see but that I loved from the moment I discovered it.”
Like an actress obeying her director, she slowly leans her head to expose slightly the nape of her neck, and he cautiously turns down the collar of her sweater, finds the spot, dark and oval and a bit worrisome, and brings his lips close and touches it with the tip of his tongue, and then puts the collar back in place and says firmly, “That’s it, I’m out of here, and don’t think I won’t try to talk Galit out of the barbaric idea to celebrate our grandson’s bar mitzvah among monkeys and lions.”