When she stands and rolls her arms through the holes of her gauzy shirt, I don’t want to go. We have a reservation, she says. A seaweed wrap before lunch.
To be wrapped I must take off all my clothes, hand over my body to the experts. Gila lies next to me, naked, and I’m not-looking because this is what women do. These thoughts surprise me. Nothing about my life now is closeted. Ours is a concealed terrace, sunny but embedded in a cool granite fortress, a fleet of leafy green plants on the floor. Bodies wrapped, our eyes are covered with plastic goggles and faces rubbed with a sandy cream. Years ago I took a mud bath in the Dead Sea, let the salt hold me up like a million tiny fingers. It’s impossible to drown, Marc said, and I felt light as a souvenir T-shirt in the East River.
Every so often a young woman sprays gentle streams of water, moistening the seaweed. I feel like an eel. A happy little eel falling in and out of sleep, relaxed in way I can’t remember ever being without drugs.
“Hello, Jen.”
I rip off my goggles. My father’s standing in front of me, and Gila’s disappeared. Bisected by cubist rays, he’s light and dark and larger than ever. I sit up slightly, afraid to crack my cellophane cover. “What are you doing here?” I ask, and he smiles — obviously the wrong question: Gila Zyskun is a rat.
“It’s great to see you.” He lights a cigarette, leans back against the granite. “I miss you. I hate being so out-of-pock-et.”
“Don’t bullshit me, Dad. Everyone’s going crazy looking for you. I’ve got lawyers harassing me, not to mention the feds... What makes you think they’re not tailing me?”
He smiles. “What’s it they say? Everyone’s got a doppelganger.”
“Shit! I should have known, the minute I heard Israel—”
“Let’s face it, your brain’s just not wired that way,” he says, dispirited I’m not the canny apprentice he’d always wanted. He shifts in the piercing rays, and I see stars, I think, I’m dizzy. I cup a hand against my forehead, twist my neck up into the sun, and our eyes meet, the stars really millions of tiny gnats, and I’m suddenly shamed, the contours of my body wet and shiny, hidden but not, the theory of latex. “Put on your clothes,” he says. “We’re having lunch.”
The early settlers survived on tilapia, my father tells me, as we’re served colorful plates of fish, hummus, pickles, pink radishes, tomatoes and cucumbers diced infinitesimally small, what they call salad. Tilapia is peasant fish; the kings ate trout. We sit on another terrace, this one also scooped into the side of the mountain but with a long dining table. We squeeze together at one end, a waterfall rushing behind us, the air cleaner and cooler than it should be on a sticky summer day. My father eats voraciously, in between bites signaling staff to bring us more food, wine, his laptop, bantering as if it hasn’t been nine months since we’ve seen each other.
“More fish?” He pushes a platter of smoked trout under my nose. I roll my eyes and break off a piece with my fork.
“Sorry about you and...”
“Barbara.”
“Right... Never liked her. How’s your mother?”
“Come on, Dad.”
“She’s my favorite, you know that.”
“She’s living in the mountains with Lionel. They’re into race horses and Fresh Air kids. And what’s going on here?”
“What?” he says, palms open, shoulders up like Gila’s, innocent as the state of Israel... What, what did I do? We’re staring but it’s hopeless: I can take him down with one look. He exhales deeply, pours another glass of wine, and the tale flows from his mouth like something out of the Old Testament. I am not in Israel for a conference. He needs my help.
Six. The kite
My ride back to Tel Aviv comes in a small sport utility vehicle with tinted windows, the driver, Moti, a stout, surly man with no neck. When I ask where’s Gila, my father steels and I know there are things he’s left out of the story, things too indecorous even for a man on his fourth wife, and I want to spit in his over-tanned face, but count... ten exhale, nine, exhale...
At the Sheraton, they still believe I am here for a government conference. “Shalom, Shalom!” they greet overzealously, asking how my day went, was there anything I needed. No, nothing, thank you, I’ll be in the gym. Forty-five minutes on the elliptical trainer gets my heart up, though I hate pumping in place, you lose the gorgeous expanse of speed. It’s your everyday corporate hotel. The gym is well equipped. In my room there are movies in English, bottles of water, free wireless, plush pillows, and a feathery comforter that reeks of stale anonymous sex. I climb under the covers and check my e-mail, when a window pops up on my screen. I’m not set to receive instant messages, but there she is: Meet me at the bar in Yaffa.
Backdropped once more by the Mediterranean, the gurgling lava lamps, ’80s lounge music, I let her apologize. “I shouldn’t even be here,” she says. “It’s dangerous.”
“What’s the danger?”
“I know he told you.”
“He said you were lovers.”
Caught sipping from her cloudy glass, she holds the liquid against the roof of her mouth, lowers her chin slightly, swallows. My neck is hot, back hot, eyes burning white, it’s all the confirmation I need. “He is a very interesting man,” she says.
“He’s a thief.”
We are silent for a moment, then she says it started as business. Says she’d been researching for him in New York, angling her way into other VC companies and investment banks, helping him figure out who was backing what, how he could bridge the right startup then liquidate it before his partners knew what hit them. Much of it was legal, she says, there’s no law against misrepresenting yourself nor using information obtained in bad faith. He made many enemies and far too much money for his tax returns — and here’s where his story gets nebulous. For years he’d been skimming profits and funneling them into Israeli accounts; before the towers fell you could do this under the radar. She liked his mind, she says, even the way he ordered meals was tactical, and he was audacious in business, could convince investors an empty shell of a company was hot issue stock... What was it like growing up with that? Big, I say, everything about him was enormous, even his absences.
Her phone goes off, that damn score, Beethoven maybe, blaring like a nervous breakdown. She looks at the number, a revelation in those few seconds, embarrassed. “Hello! Hello!” she says, some intimacy to it. “Nothing, really... I’m in the car... Sure...”
Up she goes, and I’m grateful. Cell phones: how one can ramble across from another at a table, uncivilized on any level, particularly dicey when it’s my father’s lover and he is on the other end and we are out late.
You learn over the years when people are holding back. Afraid to jump in, they extend, obfuscation teasing nightcaps, long anecdotes. Should we walk along the beach? she says. The water glows in moonlight. They say it’s phosphorus... or the remnants of oil spills. The soldiers are not far away. You get used to them. Gila drops her bomb: After the army she was recruited by Mossad. She helped develop new technologies for the field and learned how to gather information, a commodity as valuable as dry goods once were. But disillusion quickly set in, she hated politics, and she took her skills to market. She is what they call a kite.