And so, that past week when Eric picked her up from the train station in Brattleboro, she opened her mouth to tell him she was pregnant, and that whatever it was they were doing, however harmless, had to stop. But instead she had blurted, it had honestly just rolled off her tongue, that she loved him. And Eric had pulled to the side of the road, cut the ignition and said he’d loved her from that first night she walked into his restaurant and that he wanted to make a go of things, that nothing in his life had ever made more sense, and that was when the entire room went blurry for Boaz and he hung up the phone, ran to the bathroom and threw up.
“So they didn’t sleep together,” Roni said.
Boaz stared at her. “So?”
“So you know the baby’s yours.”
“Of course.”
“I don’t understand what the problem is,” Roni said. “You’re having a child together. She’ll get this man out of her system and come back to you.”
“I’d rather she slept with him than fell in love.”
An image was coming into Boaz’s mind, a photo of Mira from that campus visit to Albany he’d found her looking at one night on her laptop. It was a simple picture, her on a bench somewhere in town. But she looked happier than he’d seen her in years, shielding her eyes from the sun and smiling wide, so he’d asked to make it his screensaver, and it was only now occurring to him who had been holding the camera.
“What did you say?” Roni said.
“When?”
“After you vomited and she called you back. I’ve known you forty minutes and already I’d bet one of Eva’s Litnikovs that you picked up on the first ring.”
“Fine,” Boaz said. “I told her I felt betrayed. I told her one of the things I loved most about being married was that I felt safe with her, and I didn’t think I ever could anymore.”
Roni shook her head, sadly. “Boaz,” she said. “You tell her you felt safe, and all she hears is that her husband sees the world as dangerous.”
Boaz didn’t know what to say. He stared out the window and wondered when Jerusalem had gotten so dirty. Garbage everywhere, crumbling houses, cats darting out of trash bins — so many they must have outnumbered humans on the street. The few people outside this early all seemed so gloomy, propped against the bus depot or walking past in a hurried sleepwalk, a group of Filipino women looking as if they’d been up for hours, pushing the very young and the very old down the sidewalk. Even the sky seemed depleted, as if it wished the day would just end already. But then the driver turned off Keren HaYesod onto a side street, and Boaz caught sight of two boys kicking a soccer ball. They were young, six or seven, in t-shirts and shorts but moving too fast to feel the wind that had picked up. They were running and laughing and when one of their mothers yelled something from a window, they laughed some more. Those kids could have been anywhere — Vermont, Boston, Kiryat Gat, probably a million places Boaz had never been — and what struck him was how touchingly naïve they seemed, as if they couldn’t imagine anything that could make them happier than what they were doing right then, in that glorious moment. Suddenly Boaz was overcome by it too, a complete and spontaneous happiness. All at once it felt so simple to let go of his problems for just a minute and feel grateful to be a part of something as big and basic as that morning, that city, that street. He felt a lightness inside him, opening wider and wider as they drove through the hills up to Eva’s house, and then he climbed the steps, unlocked the door and found Mira inside, waiting on the floor of her grandmother’s empty living room.
SHE’D GOTTEN in last night, she said. Her parents had told her he was coming and she couldn’t stand the idea of him doing this alone. “I can’t stand any of it,” she said. “All I’ve been doing is feeling miserable, then feeling worse for even allowing myself to be sad.”
She stood up and reached for his arm. But she caught the sleeve of his shirt instead. Boaz hadn’t realized he was backing away until he was up against the front door. He heard the bleats of traffic outside, saw the scratches on the wall where Eva’s mail table had once been. Most of her furniture had already been sold, and the room was filled with ghostly outlines where the walls had darkened and aged around those wood tables and heavy tweed sofas. He had an eerie, immediate feeling of remembering just where things had been, the stacks of magazines covering the shiny white mail table and the large vase that always, always held fresh-cut flowers, and beside that, the ceramic umbrella stand Eva had brought back from Marrakesh—
“Boaz?”
He blinked, and everything came horribly into focus. It was almost unbearable to look at her. Her sweater was rumpled, her hair a tangled nest, and he thought about her thinking about him all night, too nervous and keyed-up to check her reflection. He knew he should feel sorry for her, this mess of a Mira. But everything, even the very fact that her matted hair suggested she’d just woken up, made him angry — he’d barely slept at all the past ten days, too afraid of what he’d dream. It didn’t even make sense that he was seeing her. Her absence had felt bolder and more intrusive than she’d ever been in person, as if it had taken on the heft of a dozen women, and now there she was, just standing there, so casually alive.
“What,” he said, finding his voice at the last possible moment, “are you doing here?”
“I’m physically sick about this.”
“What does your boyfriend say about you using up our savings to fly here?”
“He’s not my boyfriend.”
“You promise you weren’t with him this week?”
“I told you, I was with Sharon. You have to believe me.”
“But you told me you loved him.”
“I do.” She looked so tiny in that enormous room. She still wasn’t showing; if anything, she seemed as gawky and nervous as a teenager, biting her lip and stretching her sweater sleeves over her hands. “I can’t tell you how much I wish this wasn’t happening,” she said. “But it’s the truth. I love you in one way, him in another. I’m sorry. I can’t stand here and lie to you of all people, and say that Eric means nothing to me.”
“Do you understand how ridiculous you sound? Like someone we’d hate.”
She winced, as if she’d been slapped. “You know what? I want you to hate me.”
He was still backed against the door, as if it were the only way to protect himself, seeing her from this singular angle, like a sniper. All around him, the bare walls were dirty and gray and riddled with nail holes, and it struck him how depressing it was that Eva and Sy had transformed this empty space into such an interesting and beautiful life, and now a realtor was going to lead a new couple inside and apologize for those holes and then some workman would come and in twenty minutes all of it, the entire history of that room, would be spackled over.
“You don’t understand,” Mira said, “what it’s like to be with someone who exists so fully in his head. Who has no desire to leave our weird little cocoon. And then Eric would put all this effort into thinking about what would make me happy. He’d have plans for us. We’d go to lunch. We’d go on hikes.”
“We go on hikes.”
“No, Boaz, we’d go on walks outside our house. We’d walk to think, then go back to our offices to think some more. Sometimes I’d feel like we weren’t even really living together. It was like we were swimming in the same pool, but I was never allowed in your lane.”