How I began writing

How I began writing

The phone calls came in on one Friday morning in June, as I was indulging in my weekly ritual of coffee and pastry and reading the weekend papers. There were only two; both from friends who had seen the papers and automatically picked up their phones. My Nokia was buried under two inches of print, so between the rumbling of buses on Yehuda Maccabi St. and the patrons of the cafe, I nearly missed the announcement of my own death.

“Hello?”
“You’re alive!”
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
“There’s an announcement of your death in the weekend papers.”
“Really? What did I die of?”
“They don’t say. Page 24 in the back. In the classified section. Your funeral is today at noon.”
“Very funny. Some poor woman with the same name has died. A sad coincidence. What's even sadder is that you’re reading death announcements.”
“Shortage of reading material on the toilet, you know.”
“You’re sick.”
“Better sick than dead."
“Ha ha. Talk to you later. Wash your hands.”
“Bye.”

The announcements appear daily in the Israeli papers, somewhere between the classified and business sections, as if death was a used car to be negotiated and bartered off. I wondered what my namesake had died of.
I rifled through the stack of papers. The classifieds weren’t there. I glanced around at the other Friday morning readers. A fifty-ish man with shiny hair slicked back and a ridiculous Bluetooth headphone flashing in his ear was reading the classifieds.

My phone rang again.

“Hey.”
“You’re up.”
“I’m having my Friday morning coffee and papers.”
“So you’ve seen it.”
“My death? Yes.”
“Oh come on, don’t exaggerate. It’s not that bad.”
“I’m not. I was joking. It’s just someone with the same name as me.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The death announcement? Someone with my name has died.”
“Oh.”
“Why? What were you talking about?”
“It’s Sarah.”
“Sarah? My Sarah?”
Silence. Uncomfortable cough.
“You know what I mean. Fine. Not my Sarah. What about her?”
“She’s written a book. There’s a double spread interview with her. Maariv Culture section.”
“Fuck. Me.”
“That’s not all. It gets worse.”
“How much worse?”
“The book she’s written? It’s about an illicit relationship between a lecturer and an unnamed student at Tel Aviv University.”
“Holy shit.”
“Are you OK?”
“Holy shit.”
“Yael? You OK?”
“I need to read that interview.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to-“
“Don’t be silly. I’d have seen it eventually. Is the book in stores already?”
“No. Next week.”
“I have to read that interview.”
“Well, at least the picture sucks. She looks like a total cow.””There’s a PICTURE?”
“Get the paper. Call me later.”

There was a puddle of bitter espresso at the bottom of my cup. I downed it, trying to make it wash over my entire mouth, but not enough was left. My tongue felt like it had been wrapped in a towel. The arts section I was holding was from the wrong newspaper. Sarah had written a book. About us. My Sarah. Well, never technically, but still My Sarah, with a capital My. We, who had read Vita and Virginia and fantasized of how our own correspondence would one day be published. She, the world-renowned lecturer, would jet-set all over the world, giving talks about her latest book of essays on ethics (ha!), and I, the bestselling (but highbrow) fiction novelist would join her whenever our book tours crossed paths. She, who had, in a lazy game of thought-badminton, lobbed over the thought that our sexual attraction was derived from intellectual competitiveness, and I had swatted it away, secretly flattered, saying how could I compare with your brilliance. I had sat through her lectures, trying not to burn her down with my gaze. I'd graduated from University; she'd graduated from me. A book. She’d written a goddamn BOOK.
I stared down at the table. Some little pink sweetener packets had been shaken loose from their container and I absently pushed them back in. I’d managed to go without thinking about her for a very long time. She'd gone back to Oxford, and it had been over a year since we’d exchanged even the most perfunctory of emails after a scathing online dispute about the Second Lebanon War. It had been longer than that since any sign of affection peppered our correspondence, and yet longer - over two years - since that summer. But the signs and symptoms were still there, rising fresh and welted like a new tattoo. The malady had returned; I could already feel the signs of my five-year flu. My eyes started watering and my head throbbed. The people in the café continued their idle chit chat, and I resented them for their oblivion to the fact that I was dying right next to them. Sarah had written a fucking book.
A group of old men was sitting next to a pile of papers. They probably had the culture section. I approached the ringleader.

“Excuse me.”
“…I used to buy a case of wine from him every week, but the bastard stopped selling my brand. Thought he could make more off the Australian.”
“EXCUSE ME.”
“Avram, the pretty young lady is talking to you, forget about your wines.”
“Ahh… but ladies are like wine. You let them wait, and breathe, and they mature well,” he smiled, his yellow dentures glistening with spittle.
God’s self-proclaimed gift to wine and ladies was basking in his five minutes. Sadly, he was practically sitting on the pile of papers I wanted. I tried the good natured potbelly on his left.
“Sir? Have you finished with the papers?”
“Avram, give her the papers.”
“By all means, by all means,” Avram stood and allowed me access to the pile on his chair.
I almost fell over three chairs in the two meters separating me from my table, while flipping through the paper to find the interview with Sarah. I was too hungry to see her face.
It was unsettling to stare too long. The living drama of her face, etched so vividly in my mind for so long, was now a faded two-dimensional print, plastered over hundreds of thousands of newspapers, some of which would inevitably be tossed aside, used as absorbent beds for cat litter, or worse. She was looking directly at the camera, one side of those incredible lips slightly drawn up as if contentedly amused, but I instantly recognized the expression as ironic and pained, as if saying: “this is the price I must pay for fame.” I knew for a fact how camera-shy she was, and how much of an effort it had probably been to stare straight into the lens. Her eyes were not the flash of color I remembered. Damned Photoshop. Her nose still sported the same silly ring, her unoriginal attempt at non-conformity. There was something foreign about her hair, though. Perhaps it missed my fingers running through it. I wondered if the back of her neck had ever felt warm since. It was perfect, and seemed as if she was looking directly at me.
The title of the article was horrendous: “Teacher’s Petting”. I smirked. She would hate it. She had teased me endlessly for selling myself short when I used to voice my fantasies about appearing on the cover of the paper’s weekend supplement. And now she was doing it herself. What the hell was she doing writing fiction anyway? That was mine. I had dibs on the failed writer department. And now, she’d beat me to the punch, apparently using me to do it! Then a horrifying thought crossed my mind. Was this book even about me?

I can’t tell you what it said, word for word. Most of it was her background, which I already knew firsthand. I skimmed through it. The facts seemed to align with our story: like my friend had said, the book was about a university lecturer having an affair with a student. It was set at Tel Aviv University in recent years, and from what I could tell, ended tragically. But when asked the inevitable, Sarah replied: “every work of fiction has a trace of the autobiographic. But this is still a work of fiction.” And later: “No. I’ve never had an affair with a student.”
Well, at least that part was right. I had indeed no longer been a student when our… our thing began.
The book was coming out next week. Sunday. The article read: “Sarah Schiff, here in Tel Aviv on a sabbatical, is already working on her next book, tentatively titled: ‘The Ethics of Abuse”. Here in Tel Aviv. On a sabbatical.
I had been sitting at this café on Friday mornings for months. It was my neighborhood café, the waitresses knew me, they knew my laptop with the yellow Tweetie Skinit label, and would always help me get a table next to a power outlet. I knew the menu by heart. This was my home court, the most familiar of places. Now it had all gone to shit, and the bustling café seemed full of malignant strangers, all of whom would read the paper and stare accusingly at me. I wanted to die.
Suddenly remembering, my head jerked up. I noticed that slick-hair had gone, leaving his papers. I grabbed the financial section, thumbing through to the classifieds, the want ads, the used cars, the death announcements. There it was.
Our beloved
Yael Nussbaum
Has passed away
Funeral today at noon, Kiryat Shaul Cemetery
Shiva at home of the deceased, 38 Bloch St. Tel Aviv
Wow. I had always dreamed of seeing my name in print.
I looked at my watch. Eleven twenty. If I hurried, I could make it to this funeral on time.

When I reached the cemetery, I realized that I had no way of knowing which procession was “mine”. There were three large groups of people, none of whom I recognized. One of the groups looked ready to move, and I followed the two gravediggers as they wheeled a body wrapped in a white shroud on a stretcher out of the funeral hall. The mass walked slowly forward, until it stopped and spilled out into a crude circle around a freshly dug pile of earth near a hole. The hole was square and neat, but looked hardly deep enough to be a proper grave. People pulled out their cell phones to make sure they were silenced. Distracted, I pulled out my own, but was not quick enough to block the cheerful yodel announcing an incoming text message. This drew several looks and I quickly stepped aside. “1 new message” it said. The text message was from a number I didn’t recognize and read: “Heads up, on the right. By the giant chess piece.” My head shot up, and my eyes scanned the area. The rabbi had started his drone of prayer, and I tried to listen in to the names, to catch a clue. Then I saw it. The tip of a horse’s mane set in stone. Craning my neck, I could make out the entire horse’s head. Some chess champ must be buried there. Standing on tiptoe, I could see someone standing in a shadow by the large horse. A sound rose from my chest into my throat and remained there, like the stone of a cherry mistakenly swallowed: it was Sarah.

My entire range of opportunities flashed before my eyes: I could run. Towards her or from her. Soft Cell looped crazily through my head: Once I ran to you, now I run from you… I could hug her or kick her. I could pretend not to know her. I could feign amnesia. I could lie. Worse, I could tell the truth. I had imagined our next encounter so many times it had grown as ragged at the edges as a favorite terrycloth robe. I could not move. She took one hesitant step in my direction, and her face was no longer in the shadows. Her hair was indeed styled differently, but other than that it was all the same: those grey serious slacks, their crease so severely cut, were the straightest thing about her. Her black top, set off by her pale white face, punctuated by that mouth. I stood petrified.
She took a step towards me, and a year of determination succumbed to five of desire.
I was furious. Now I had to talk to her. Now I had to walk over there. Had to seem strong. Thank god for the two coffees, I thought miserably, as fatigue washed over me, deadening my legs. I pulled away from the group of mourners around the grave, my legs heavy. It felt like walking in water. I was walking towards her.

She leant irreverently against a grave. She looked slimmer, but I couldn’t trust my eyes until I touched her and saw for myself. I lifted my chin slightly.

“Hi.”
“Hi.”

I’m not going to take off my sunglasses. If she sees my eyes, I’m finished.

“I see you’re not dead, then,” she says.
“That depends on how you define dead.” Great start.
“Well, I’m glad you’re not dead,” she says, smiling.
“Why?”
“It would have been too weird. When I saw the announcement I felt a terrible sense of the uncanny. Killing you off and then seeing you were really dead. It would have been too symmetrical.”
“What?” My vocabulary, it seems, is limited to “wh” questions.
“My book. It came out this week. In the ending, you died. How awful it would be to discover you were really dead.”
“Oh, that.”
“So you’ve heard about it.”
“I saw something in the paper. Congratulations.”
“You don’t mind, do you? Me using our story as an example?”
“An example?” Our story? Our STORY?
“Bad choice of words. Not example. But me writing about what happened?”
“Well, that depends on what you wrote, I guess.”
“I'm sorry I had to kill you.”
“How did I die?”
“You’ll have to read the book.”
She's flirting with me, and my throat tightens. I want to rush over to her and throw her on a grave, to lie on top of her and inhale her. I bet she smells terrific. I dare not draw close enough to confirm.
“I always thought I’d be the fiction writer,” I venture.
“I think it’s safe to say that this is my only foray into fiction. I prefer essays. I’m more comfortable with them.”
“So why did you write this?”
“With art, you can’t be comfortable all of the time.”
I want to strangle her. What the hell does she know about art? She is the critic. I know about art. I know about suffering. I have seventeen aborted beginnings on my laptop at home, all of them first parts of the novel I would write about us. I am the victim here. She bailed. Went AWOL when it mattered most, and now she’s returned to give her account of something, that in her mind, never even happened.
“So was it easy to kill me?”
She shrugs. “It was a fictional device. I needed closure in my plot.”
I snort. “I bet it would have been easier if I had really died.”
She looks at me curiously. “Why?”
“Well, nothing would have been your fault, and you could have been the remorseful lover-”

“Lover?”

I think of red- hot embers on a grill, a hissing sound, the scorching of flesh. Then I look at her.

“Yael, what happened between us was a meeting of the minds on the most cosmic of levels. We were never lovers... we were souls converging on a plane, in an unfortunate point in time – that plane being English Literature. It could have happened anywhere, at a supermarket, if we shopped the same brands, at a rock concert, if your taste in music was decent” – here she actually had the nerve to wink at me – “you get my point. Thinking about something doesn’t make it happen. I was your teacher. I couldn’t have acted upon anything, even if I had wanted to. I was flattered by your letters - your… attempts. No one had ever paid me such attention before. But I’ve told you – we were never…” her voice falters. “We could never be…”

“And yet here you are. At the supposed funeral of the main character of your first book of fiction.”

“Of course I am! Don’t you think I care? You were thought inspiring. I was uplifted. You made this all possible. Your – your attentions got me thinking. About Platonic love,
about Eros and Agape and the difference between them. The modes of loving. The distance between thought and emotion-"

“I can’t believe you’re going into all that academic horseshit. Or maybe I can. You always escaped into the big words when you couldn’t deal with life. You would disappear for days and then excuse yourself by telling me we’d had conversations in your mind. You would pretend to listen to what I said and then ignore most of it. I was forgiving and patient, and you took advantage of that, never honest enough to admit you just got a kick out of my devotion. Well, you just stick to your academia. Read your Henry James. Read your Simone Weil and your Levinas, your Buber and Lacan. Read and read and read your books, because you suck at reading people. You are forever on the brink, testing those waters, running back and forth with your thermometers and instruments, theorizing and speculating and experimenting, but your feet remain dry, don’t they? Just like you ran from me, when it all got too real.” I pause for breath, and then mutter, “Did you write about that in your book?”

“I only told it like it is.”

“That wasn’t at all the way it was, and you know it.”

She looked at me then, managing to hold my gaze. Her mouth was wounding me, those incredible lips falling on my bare back like a whip, leaving their welts. Her harsh words were quickly piling up between us, a fortress I would once again have to plunder in my attempt at conquest. The sickness had returned: I knew I would be replaying those words time and again in my mind, trying to forget. But her eyes were full of other words: words of regret and sadness. When they finally came out, they were barely more than a whisper.

“Then write it differently.”