A Difficult Phase
Talia was in line at Café Noah when she noticed a man watching her. He was at the group table by the window, handsome in a nerdy, chaotic way, wearing a rumpled orange t-shirt and metallic glasses a shade lighter than his hair. He smiled. She smiled back. He smiled again, and Talia, interested more in the light buzz of flirtation than an actual conversation, gave him one last look, then tossed her change in the tip jar.
Out on Ahad Ha’am Street, people were clustered around little tables lining the sidewalk, sipping coffee and smoking leisurely though it was noon on a Wednesday. The sun was out after an entire April of rain, and as Talia rounded the corner, she wondered if she was the only person in all of Tel Aviv rushing back to eat at her desk, the only person who would have left the café so quickly when one day, she knew, these situations could magically stop presenting themselves. So she turned back — and saw the man in the orange t-shirt barreling toward her.
“Did I forget something?” she asked him.
“What?”
“In the café.”
“No,” he said. “You look familiar — Hebrew University?” and when she shook her head he said, “Maybe from the neighborhood?” Before Talia could think of an answer, before she could tilt her head and say “possibly” in an alluring and noncommittal way, rather than the truth, which was that, at twenty-nine, her career was shot, she’d moved back home with her parents in Rehovot, a half-hour south of the city, and the only reason she was even in the neighborhood was because she’d picked up fact-checking work nearby at the local paper they left out for free on trains and in Laundromats, Mr. Orange T-shirt blinked a couple times, then said, “Oh, fuck it. You were flirting with me in there, right?”
She had been flirting, and the realization made her feel better — at least it was interesting. Better than going back to her office, where a deadline and a morning’s worth of unopened emails loomed. The man looked about forty, with large blue eyes and pale, stubbled skin. Though they were standing still, he was out of breath, and his sense of personal space was off by a centimeter or two. She did a quick ring check and pegged him as recently divorced, the type who patrolled cafés for love during his lunch hour.
“It’s hard to tell,” he continued. “Maybe you were just being nice.”
“No,” Talia conceded, “I was flirting.” She’d said a lot of bold things in her life but never something so direct to a person she didn’t know, and it threw her so off-balance that when he started to walk, Talia fell into step with him. She was aware they were heading away from the paper, but she could feel the day breaking open. She liked that neither of them seemed to have a particular destination, that they were just ambling around, something she only did on vacation. They turned down a narrow street, and she watched two girls, quick and earnest, chase each other through a courtyard while an older man, several stories above, watered his plants. Everything felt squintingly bright and a little too in focus, as if she’d just stumbled into the daylight after a heavy night of drinking: the cloudless sky, the sparkly asphalt road, the squares of silver foil covering a woman’s hair in a salon window. At the corner Talia and the man made a right, then crossed a boulevard and walked up another road until they were standing in front of a junior high school. “I have to go,” he said, and Talia realized that on her supposedly aimless, carefree walk she’d actually followed this man back to work.
“You’re a teacher?” She felt so exposed. What had she expected — to run off to some hotel room together; that an hour with a stranger, something she only right then realized she’d even been contemplating, was going to fix everything?
“I have a meeting with the principal. My daughter’s been cutting class.”
“I was terrible in school,” Talia said, to say something. “I cheated on all my tests.”
“I’m late,” he said, “but can I call you?”
Talia hesitated. But she liked his messy hair and light eyes and the open and slightly injured way he stared at her, so she gave him her work number. “Thanks,” he said, buoyant with approval.
He waved and sprinted across the street. At the sidewalk he turned around. “I’m Tomer,” he yelled.
“Talia,” she called back.
“Ah,” he yelled. “Dahlia. What a beautiful name,” and then dashed up the steps of the school, disappearing into the crowd of teenagers being beckoned inside.
SHE WAS surprised to discover how giddy she felt when Tomer didn’t wait the requisite three days to phone but did so that afternoon, when she was still at her desk, waiting for a callback on a story.
“Do you like food?” he said when she picked up.
“Only when I’m hungry.”
“Indian food,” he said, as if it were her problem for not inferring that in his question. “There’s a new place on Rothschild that has the best curry, made by guys from Goa. They cook it different there.”
“I know,” she said. “I’ve been.”
“What are the chances?”
“I’d say they’re pretty high,” she said. Asking a Tel Avivian if they’d been to Goa was like asking if they’d been to Jerusalem, and in fact the main reason Talia lasted only a month in India was that it had felt like an extension of college, the army, her old neighborhood in Rehovot. She’d left Israel to meet new people, not to run into her neighbor on a trek through Netravali or her father’s cousin Rivka at a full-moon beach party. And so, when a job finally opened in Kiev, Talia had taken off immediately. When are you coming back? her parents would ask during their weekly calls — they thought she was insane for wanting to report on the very city her grandparents had worked so hard to leave. The moment Talia heard their voices, she felt as if she’d been yanked across the Mediterranean and transported back home, her father on the porch listening to the radio, her mother always beside him, shelling fava beans or peeling beets, her two sisters chasing after their toddlers while their husbands relaxed on the lawn.
“Things are working out here,” Talia would tell them, wondering how just having them on the end of the line could make her feel as defensive as she’d been at sixteen. Though they never said it outright, she could hear the question that always lurked beneath: when was she going to get this silly rebelliousness out of her system and move home to start a family? But the truth was that things had been working out. Talia had wanted to be a reporter since she could remember, and it had stunned her, sitting in her cubicle in Kiev, that her life was actually unfolding the way she had fantasized. She’d started at the Jerusalem bureau of an American paper right out of college, doing whatever grunt work was needed: filing, fact-checking, going on coffee runs when the intern was busy. But her English was near-fluent, and after years of begging and badgering the bureau chief, he finally started giving her work, as if the very behavior that had gotten her sent to the corner as a child was the thing that garnered his respect.