And the Bride Closed the Door Read online

  He remembered her protruding kneecap when she’d placed her leg on his thigh in the taxi and rubbed her sore heels. Margie’s sharp, bronzed kneecap with the thick scar from when she’d fallen off her bike at age seven. He remembered how she’d told him about that fall, when she’d rolled down the street with the bike. She was lying on the side of the road, her arms and knees bleeding, and when a woman walked by and wanted to help, she’d told her, “Don’t do me any favors.” There was enormous wonder in him now at that “Don’t do me any favors,” which she’d recounted to him with both disgust and pride. It was a completely different species of wonder, so much deeper than the previous one, from two years ago, when she’d told him the bike story and his wonderment had been somehow tempered with bemusement.

  And then there was the men’s shoe store. The grooms’ store, to be precise. And the salesclerk, at once obsequious and indifferent, who had aroused a strange loathing in Matti. The moment of embarrassment when he took his shoes off and discovered a hole in one sock, which he put his hand over. How he’d been embarrassed in front of Margie and how she’d suddenly put her arms around him (a moment earlier she’d been completely absorbed in her broken thumb nail, and he’d felt clumsy and superfluous in the store’s fragrant air), put her lips on his neck and whispered, “I saw your shame.”

  Just then the clerk came over with those patent leather shoes, the ones Margie had seen in the window before they’d walked in and had clapped her hands delightedly. He’d given her a sideways glance, suspicious yet enchanted by her childish excitement (“Matti, don’t say ‘childish’ any time you don’t understand something,” she’d once scolded him), and as they’d walked through the store’s automatic doors he’d told her, “You . . . Anyone can buy you with all that glittery stuff, just like the Indians,” but she didn’t hear, she was already talking to the salesclerk, who treated her with esteem, having figured out instantly who had the power and who made the decisions in this couple.

  Was that what irritated him so much when he rejected the shoes, pushed the box back at the clerk, laced up his own shoes, and stormed out of the shop? Margie was in no hurry to follow. Not in any real hurry. He remembered the moments he’d spent standing outside, next to a glass recycling bin, slightly embarrassed by himself, almost choking from the way she’d hurt him by not hurrying out after him. He repeated to himself over and over again what he planned to say to her, or rather to hurl at her: “I’m not a doll that you dress up in flashy shoes, do you understand?” Each time he recited the line and reached the crescendo—“understand?”—with its rhetorical, echoing question mark, he felt the blood pulsing in his temples. Pulsing, that was the word. What the hell was she doing in the store all that time? He was so astonished when she finally emerged and walked slowly toward him, smiling and dragging her injured feet on the sidewalk as if nothing had happened (by this point her heels were hanging off the edge of the shoes and the Band-Aids were tattered and almost completely falling off), linked her arm with his and said: “Let’s go see Harry Potter.”

  And he bought the black patent leather shoes. In the end. He bought them. Went back the next morning to that disgusting shop, bought them without trying them on, and went straight home with the box. “There’s probably a special section of hell for idiots like me,” he told her when they sat on the balcony drinking coffee, the empty shoe box between them and the black shoes on his feet. Margie leaned over to the shoes, polished them with the hem of her skirt and held them up to her face, straining to see her nose reflected in the lacquer. “Stop rehashing it, Matti. You just wanted to make me happy, what’s the big deal?” she said.

  Matti looked at the door mistrustfully, wanting to knock again, but his hand remained suspended in midair for a while. From the living room or the kitchen he heard Nadia’s voice, high-pitched and almost screechy, lying on the phone: “No, no, Margie’s fine. Fine. She’s a little bit under the weather. Yes, I gave her an aspirin. She’s laying down, yes, I told her to lay down awhile, so she’ll get her strength back this evening.”

  His stomach started murmuring, contracting and dizzying in ominous swirls, and he abandoned the door and ran to the toilet. There, with his thighs on the seat that felt cool and calming, he found himself preoccupied by counting the blue porcelain tiles on the wall over the bathtub. He got mixed up and started over again, wondering if he should begin with the row of tiles at his eye level or at the top row, where the shower head protruded. As he voided himself and simultaneously counted and recounted the tiles, there began to arise in his mind, level upon level, a structure that was both paralyzed and paralyzing, which he called “the practical aspect of the situation,” or rather the long and bothersome line that represented its various embodiments: first, his parents, then the wedding hall that had been booked and the wedding hall’s owner, the large financial deposit his parents had given the owner, the hundreds of guests who couldn’t possibly be notified of the wedding’s cancelation, the photographer they had paid in advance, the band, the bed-and-breakfast that had been reserved in the Galilee for that night, the decorated car (not his, a friend from work’s), and various other tedious details that branched out from these. For some reason, the image now branded in his mind (he zipped up his pants and buckled his belt) was of Gramsy, and it popped out and rose up insistently from the crowded mass of anxieties and tasks. Her radiant yet absent face (an absence that, strangely, was extremely full and not at all a void), the fold at the bottom of her chin that touched the collar of her festive white dress, which sat quietly in its place, wondrously and innocently unknowing, and which almost brought tears to Matti’s eyes at this moment.

  He went back to the shut door, infused with a surprising energy derived from the memory of that white collar, and knocked firmly. “Margie!” he called. He waited a moment and added a note of charm to his voice: “Honey? Answer me. Say something.” He heard a rustle in the room, from behind the door, or at least he thought he did. There was a sound that resembled padding feet, followed by silence. “Margie,” he tried again, fixing his look on the door’s smooth brown veneer, but he could feel the desire and the capacity to produce words dying inside him, rotting right in front of his eyes with astounding speed, like summer fruit in a bowl. He looked away from the door and his eyes wandered down the dark hallway to his right, finally settling on a framed tapestry of three roses embroidered in faded red that hung on the wall. “Is this because of what happened last night, Margie? That we fought yesterday? But we made up in the end, that’s what I can’t understand. When I left you at night we made up and everything was okay and you walked me to the car and then you ran and woke up Yaron to get his cables ’cause my car wouldn’t start, so what happened? What happened since then? Would you please come out of there and tell me what exactly I’m supposed to do now? Margie! Do you hear me? Do you want this to end up with a locksmith? Do we have to get a locksmith here to break open the door? Is it going to end up with a locksmith? I demand that you come out now and tell me to my face what you want to say! To my face. I have a right to know, do you hear me? It’s my right to at least hear it from you. Can you even imagine what I’m feeling right now? Do you even care what I’m going through with this whole mess you’ve made?” He spun around and leaned his back against the door, his knees slightly bent from weakness. “I’m thinking over what happened and I can’t understand it,” he went on. “I can’t. Not that I understood your reaction yesterday, but by the end of it I didn’t care that I couldn’t understand, because we made up. But could you maybe explain to me what that fight was about? What were we fighting about? You sat there for two hours without saying anything. Two hours. With a face like someone died or was sick or something. Until you finally said something. I didn’t get it and I don’t get it now either, how someone can go off the deep end like that, but at least you said something. And what was that all about—what? Margie, do you hear me? If I told someone what that whole thing was about they wouldn’t believe me, I swear they wouldn’t; I don�
��t believe it either when I tell it to myself. What would I say? That my girlfriend, the girl I was going to marry the next day, drove herself and me crazy because while we were watching a movie on TV about Leah Goldberg, I said it was too bad I never knew her or met her, and that maybe I would have loved her for real and been able to rescue her from that difficult life she had with men who didn’t love her? That’s all I said! Margie, she’s dead! Leah Goldberg’s been dead for years already! Do you get that? How can you throw a jealous fit over a poet who’s been dead for years, and not just that but also tell me we’re not right for each other and we have to call the whole thing off? Margie!” He turned to the door again and pounded on it with his fists. “Listen to me carefully now, because I’m only going to say this once. If you don’t come out now, right now, and talk to me, then I’m the one who doesn’t want to get married, not you. Understand? I don’t want to marry you—not now, not ever.” He stopped speaking, suddenly stunned by the total silence on the other side of the door. A frightened pallor washed over him all at once, galloped up from his feet to his forehead as though a solution had been injected into him. “Margie, are you okay? Just tell me you’re okay, Margie. Are you?” He leaned down to his right shin and scratched it hard, as if something had stung him. He pulled his pant leg up to his knee, exposing a red, stinging rash on his skin, and kept scratching, digging his nails in until it was covered with dark red lines.

  The doorbell rang for a long time (it sounded like the airport melody: final boarding call) and Nadia froze in the kitchen (gripping a greasy frying pan covered with dishwashing soap), tensing up as if the caller were a collection agency or the security services. Then she snapped out of it, stepped away from the sink, picked up her lipstick from the table and hastily applied it, and smacked her lips together as she walked to the door. Matti’s parents walked in, dressed semiformally (the mother’s red hair was braided into a high updo studded with pearls, stretching her painted eyebrows out toward her temples, but she wore a zip-up tracksuit top so as not to mess up her hairstyle). They paused just inside for a long time and glanced fearfully around the apartment. Ilan and Gramsy sat side by side on the couch, watching television and snacking on pumpkin seeds. It was Gramsy who cracked the shells in her mouth and carefully placed the shelled seeds in Ilan’s hand.

  Finally the parents sat down next to each other in the dining area, encircled by several stuffed shopping bags they’d brought with them, which were piled on top of one another like sandbags in a fortification line. Nadia sat down opposite them, poured Coke into tall glasses (“Do you have Diet?” Matti’s mother asked), and forbade herself to say anything until they did. She did not trust the volume or tone of her voice. The brief silence—disturbed only by the fizzing of the liquid in the glasses and the loud metallic clangs coming from downstairs, where the gas canisters were being switched out by the gas company workers—sprawled between them, juicy and charged with unspoken ideas. “Okay, so?” said Arieh, Matti’s father. He removed his reading glasses from their case, polished them thoroughly, and put them gingerly on his nose. “What’s happening, how are things progressing?”

  He was an affable man (“Delicate, delicate, a delicate person,” Nadia had observed with restrained reverence after their first meeting), at least a head shorter than his wife Peninit (she had changed her name from Penina years ago), clear-eyed, and on his large bald head he had several reddish-purple splotches, covered by a Chicago Bulls cap he wore frequently, winter and summer, much to Peninit’s chagrin (“All right, wear a hat, but why a kid’s hat? Why? Can’t you find something better?”), and even now, when he removed the hat and put it on the dining table, she glared at it resentfully. Two years ago he had retired from his job with the Israel Electric Corporation and now spent most of his days on the beach with his other retired friends, busying himself with long phone calls to the lawyers who were representing him in a suit against his brother (who was not invited to the wedding) over a challenge to his late mother’s will.

  If it were up to him (“If this were up to me,” he often started to say, staring at Peninit, and his voice seeped into the silent loop left by his unfinished sentence), he would have given up the legal battle long ago, negotiated with his brother and reached a compromise. But Peninit, as well as the brother’s two sons, viewed any attempt at compromise as a stinging insult and a grave injury to their honor (“It has nothing to do with money”). Things became especially fraught when, shortly after the mother’s death, Matti and Margie moved into her home and were kicked out in the middle of the night by Arieh’s brother’s sons, who claimed the couple had neglected the garden and the lawn, hadn’t paid the bills, and had allowed the apartment to deteriorate into such a disgraceful state that the neighbors complained to the sanitation department. Arieh did not believe this slander about his son and his girlfriend, and insisted that the whole affair was “just a mistake, a misunderstanding, as they say,” a claim that drove Peninit mad because it attested to what had always tormented and anguished her about Arieh, one single quality that went by three different names: innocence, total blindness when it came to human beings and their motives, and superficial judgment bordering on stupidity.

  Now (seated around the brass-framed, rectangular, glass-top dining table in Nadia’s apartment, while the tall glasses of Coke sweated beads of condensation) Peninit’s adorned fingers, their nails freshly polished in an antique shade of pink, played with a matchbox that sat on the table. She took the matches out of the box, arranged them in front of her in a straight line, then separated them into pairs. She avoided looking at Nadia’s face, which had an ashen tone and contained, Peninit sensed, a call for help that Nadia herself was completely unaware of, which was precisely what made it so painful to Peninit.

  “I don’t know what to say, I really don’t,” were the words finally blurted out by that ashen face—not by Nadia herself.

  Peninit found the courage to look up, although in fact she looked past Nadia, at the milky lamp shade behind her. “What’s going on?” she asked. “What’s up with Margie?”

  The ashen tone vanished, pulled off at once like a rubber mask, and fury mixed with insult imbued Nadia’s cheeks with a newfound strength, making them suddenly flower into a purple blush. “Who told you about Margie?” she asked in a metallic voice. “Who’s already been blabbing?” They looked at each other awkwardly, momentarily united in their covenant of embarrassment. “We called Ilan. No one answered so we called Ilan, we didn’t have any choice,” Peninit confessed, uncomfortably rearranging her body on the chair and fiddling with the tracksuit’s zipper pull, waiting for things to settle inside her and to find her trusty voice packaged and preserved like a carton of powdered milk. (She was a deputy branch manager at the National Insurance Institute.) “That’s not the point now, Nadia, who said and who didn’t say. Not the point. Don’t even get into that. What’s going on with Margie, that’s the point,” she accentuated and let out the last two words as though spitting out two plum pits she’d been rolling around in her mouth. Nadia stared distractedly into space, touched her chin, and probed around with her fingers for the three tough hairs that had recently sprouted on it. “That Ilan,” she said ponderously, almost serenely, “I’ll dig his eyes out one day with a teaspoon, that Ilan.”

  “Did you want me?” Ilan suddenly appeared, as though having erupted from the large air-conditioning unit to the right of the table, along with the chilled air. “What’s up?” He went over to the sink and emptied out a dish of pumpkin seed shells.

  “Did you tell them about Margie? You open your big mouth?” Nadia fumed. (The couple trembled slightly when she said “them,” and turned their synchronized facial expressions toward the front door.) “They asked,” Ilan explained, leaning over the kitchen sink with his back to Nadia. “They called, so I told them.” Nadia hurried over to him (her thighs got a little tangled up in the dress’s satin slip) and pinched his thin arm, hard. “Hurt? Hurt? That’s what you did to me, you made it hurt. That�
��s not even anything compared to the hurt you gave me,” she cried. Ilan barely forced out a smile, exposing two large front teeth (he was considering getting them filed down) and rubbed his aching arm: “Way to go! Good for you, Aunt Nadia,” he said. Arieh started to get up, pushed his Bulls hat away a little, and the glass of Coke fell over and spilled. “Come on, come on, really. We’re family. Family,” he said, and mopped up the brown puddle of Coke with paper napkins that promptly became sopping wet and disintegrated. Arieh helplessly crushed the napkins between his fingers, and as he did so he noticed a large wet stain on the front of his pants, tried to wipe it off with the crumpled ball of wet napkins, and urged them again, “Family, we are. Family.”