One security officer approaches a man a few people ahead of me, who presents his passport, Israeli, and the back and forth begins. I make out a few words... Nothing... I go to travel... Paris. Closer to the checkpoint, I fear the religious drag might be all wrong; everyone hates the orthodox. I take heavy breaths, heart like full magazine fire, counting backwards... ten exhale, nine exhale, eight, exhale... a technique from my days on ice, those last few minutes before pushing off when you’re led into position based on a coin toss. Random. Waiting for a signal, the gunshot, and it’s do die. Counting was the only way to clear my head. Still is... four, exhale... three, exhale...
A soldier moves into another line full of tourists, careful to keep the nose of his M16 to the left. The IDF has an arms code peppered with words like humanity and dignity. Soldiers respect their rifles. No solace as they advance, and I know I’m doing something I shouldn’t be doing, and probably for all the wrong reasons: guilt, loyalty... My father says all people are motivated by sex or money. As a teenager, declaring myself the opposition, I’d float examples to ruin his theory, and ask about, say, nuns. “Sex,” he replied. “God is sex.” The president (can’t remember which one): “That’s too easy, Jen. Watch the State of the Union. See the way the idiot smiles, rolls his fist, senators, dignitaries, special guests sitting and standing like puppets, the eyes of the whole world on him up there at the podium, and you know he’s doing it all for the friggin’ lead pipe in his pants.”
My father is crude in a way that can delight as much as disgust. He knows the feeling of hundreds of thousands of eyes on him, the lead pipe. He’s made me what I am today, standing a few travelers from interrogation, limbs on alert, stuffed with enough stolen information to detain me in the Holy Land — and not how I’d like it. I start the count all over again, ten, exhale...
Nine. The conference (five days earlier)
She finds me at the bus depot, grabbing my arm as I’m about to board the shuttle in the thick, dusty parking lot. “What are you thinking?” She pulls me back, lemony rose scent eclipsing burning fuel, vegetable oil, falafel. “You make it so hard to see you with those drab clothes. I have to find you, don’t I?”
She’s got loose brown curls, dark skin, and freckles. Lips like a blow pop. Israeli women might be the sexiest in the world. Utterly brazen and comfortable in their skin.
“You look much better than I thought,” she says, leading me to a creamy white sports car. A little Honda. “You don’t photograph well. And the stories make you so hard and serious. But you’re okay. Ma?... What? What’s the problem?”
I nod. “Nothing, I—”
“Why are you standing there? Open the door.”
“Are you from the conference?”
A quick stare, candied lips cracking slightly. “Get in,” she says.
As a child, I could recite the exact number of city blocks to my father’s office. I knew when the streets got skinnier, the buildings taller, where we’d come upon the World Trade Center. My father hated the towers from the moment they went up, said they blighted the district. His revenge was buying up souvenir T-shirts and dumping them into the river, buying because he would never rob anyone of their livelihood — not if they were making less than he was. Week after sunny week, cotton shirts bobbed around lower Manhattan, from above resembling a wispy cirrus cloud, said my painterly mother, who like all of us mourned when the police caught up with him. That was the first time he made the cover of the New York Post
Wall Street begins with an old church and ends at the river, the New York Stock Exchange its sire. My father liked being near the exchange, though he rarely visited the floor. He’d made a name shoveling his family’s millions into venture capital and private equity, ideas thrilling him more than commodities. The family had traded in dry goods, which seemed as remote as amber waves of grain, you don’t hear much about dry goods anymore. My father claimed his was the tallest building on the street, and maybe that’s why he hated the towers. From his windows, you could see past the Empire State Building, out to the row houses in Queens and Brooklyn, airports and wetlands, industrial New Jersey. “Take a look at my shtetle, Jen,” he said, lifting me up high and despite his tight grip on my hips I felt dizzy, the drop so far and only a thin pane of glass between me and the end. I read somewhere that people who work on high floors in offices are more likely to have affairs. Something about the thin air and subliminal sense of danger keeps them keyed up. Like driving through a city on pins and needles.
“Always there is so much traffic,” Gila says, as we inch along Ha-Yarkon. She’d given me a few hours to relax at the Sheraton, read through the conference literature. The government had invited me to present on international philanthropy. Once I was a competitive speed skater; now I spend my days handing out the family’s money, though many of my father’s assets have been frozen since he disappeared. “The people of Tel Aviv, they like to go out, dress well, eat well... They don’t let much get in the way. The city is full of pride. Always they compare it to New York City — of course, most people who say this have never been to New York City. But they are very cosmopolitan and alive. Makes a lot of traffic.”
“If I were an urban planner,” I offer, for a moment actually considering it, “I’d invent a city without cars.”
“Hold on.” Gila smiles, then turns off the main boulevard, steadying us through venous streets, tourists left lagging beneath the palms. For me, Tel Aviv has always conjured Miami Beach with its concrete terraces, salty-dog air, and long, languorous summers, hotels shooting up against blue-green water... and Jews. All the little old ladies who argue with you in supermarkets and eat dinner at 5 o’clock. But a few generations have given the natives their own look, a tougher dark skin, mirrored in the metallic skyscrapers shooting up around the flat white boxes, many of them historic. The city’s also got its own twin towers, though they’re fraternaclass="underline" one rectangular, one round, and still they smack of tragedy.
We pull up in front of a coastal bar in Yaffa, the old Arab port, now low on Arabs, high on cafés. Inside Gila signals a man in a gauzy black linen suit who kisses the air next to her cheek two times as Israeli men do and bows reverently, then leads the two of us to a secluded outdoor table overlooking the black-and-white waves, tiny lava lamps strung along the patio, chairs like ice cubes. Very chic, Gila says. She orders a clear liquor that clouds when you add water. I wanted a Coke but with the waiter in front of me say Scotch, neat. I am not supposed to drink, a little wine with dinner, but... Gila’s studying the way I lift my glass and swallow, as if she knows.
“You must be tired,” she says. “I hate flying over the Atlantic. Small flights, sure, but anything more than two hours... I try to set my watch two days before to the new time. Sometimes I take a little hashish, a pill. I have a pill if you’d like.”
I say no thanks, order another Scotch. Gila tells me she learned to fly planes in the army, often winged undercover into Lebanon, Syria, Iraq on fact-finding missions. There were no female fighter pilots when she served and she was training in psychological warfare. I ask what’s psychological warfare and she says strategy. You study your enemy, learn his mind, his methods, so you can defeat him. I say dumb American things like “wow.” I ask when she served, trying to guess her age, and she says between the Intifadas... mid-’90s? She’s younger than her talk, younger than me, and though she’s posturing I am enjoying our conversation, the thick winds coming off the sea, slow songs from the ’80s, American. Chic? I ask if she was ever in combat.