“I do. I’ve been thinking about America a lot.”
“You have?” he says, too excitedly, as if it meant she were thinking of him. Trying to erase that question, to back away from his eagerness, he says, “Can I buy it for you, then? I’d like to.”
“You can. But that would be odd.” Then, attempting greater clarity, the waitress says, “I think maybe ‘forward’ is what I mean. Or ‘intimate.’ It is a strange offer from you. ‘Odd,’ yes? Does that make sense?”
He imagines she is going on because he has not properly responded. It’s not that he’s misunderstood. It’s that Z is doing his best to listen, trying to maintain eye contact, to engage with this woman. The waitress seems to have chipped a front tooth since he last saw her. And Z just wants to stare at that chipped tooth for a lifetime, preferably without interruption of any kind.
He apologizes for making so forward an offer and then offers to buy it for her, still.
The waitress lets him. And the novel goes into a tote along with all of his. From there, they walk the neighborhood, and she accepts when he invites her for a drink.
They sit at Café St. Victor, one of the infinitely repeated, nondescript but effortlessly special bistros in the city. They joke and laugh and trade stories. They drink Kir Royales and eat fries, both talking nonstop, their conversation quieting only when he gazes at her lovingly or when she, having decided on dessert, is besotted by her chocolate mousse.
He asks her about her particularly excellent English, which was extra-particularly strong for an Italian. “Yes, we’re unparalleled in all of Europe for not caring how good our English is,” she says. “There’s a small, private bilingual school in Rome, and that’s where I went.”
“Is someone American?”
“My parents thought it would give me an advantage.”
“And has it?”
“It’s made this date especially nice.”
They have such a lovely time, such a warm and open time, that it surprises neither of them when she follows him home. He brings her back to his apartment, not caring if she knows where he lives. In fact, he desperately wants her to know where she might find him. Terrified that if she slips off, he might lose her again.
They sit on his sad sofa and kiss for a long time, and talk for a long time, and then kiss some more. They move to the bed, and take off some clothes, with the waitress firmly returning Z’s hands to him whenever they stray too far. Z, overcome with excitement, kisses her and kisses her, happily losing his mind in a completely fresh and different way. They doze, with Z drifting off overjoyed. At some point in the night, they drowsily kiss some more, before falling into a deeper round of sleep.
When Z opens his eyes in the morning, he cannot believe that the waitress lies by his side. The light shines brightly through the arched bedroom door, and a softer light brightens the room from the courtyard-facing window.
The waitress opens her eyes, feeling his stare, and pulls the pillow over her head.
“That was fun,” she says from underneath. “All that kissing.”
“I thought so too.”
She lifts a corner of the pillow to look at him. “Then we’re in agreement,” she says, lowering that corner and going back to sleep for quite a spell.
Z runs out to the bakery for a baguette de campagne. He stops at the open-air market for fresh yogurt in little glass jars that make him feel even more in love. He buys fruit from three different farm stalls, berries and peaches, and a watermelon, which sends him into the closest shop for Bulgarian cheese.
He sets out the whole spread on the apartment’s old wooden table and then hovers between the arch of the bedroom door and the kitchen, so he can start on a coffee as soon as she stirs.
When the waitress finally stumbles out, she’s wearing her underwear and his T-shirt, the one he met her in last night.
In place of a “good morning” Z says, “After I saw you at the restaurant the first time, I hoped, every day, that you’d come back.”
“They stopped giving me shifts. The day I met you was my first and last.”
“Sounds like waitressing may not be your greatest strength.”
“It does, doesn’t it,” she says, sitting at the table and popping a berry into her mouth. “But maybe it’s yours? Let’s see how well you wait on me.”
Z scoops and steeps and plunges. He pours the coffee into a bowl and brings it to her at the table, with a towel folded over his arm.
“How am I doing so far?” he says.
“Excellent service. I’d come back to this place.”
“Would you?” he says. “Honestly?”
She looks at him, taking real time to consider.
“I’ve never dated a Jewish boy before,” she says. “We have kind of a shortage in Rome. But the way you act so vulnerable and so needy, the way you’re so polite and unaggressive in bed, all of it together is really sexy to me.”
“So you’d see me again?”
The waitress bites into her bread and takes a sip of the coffee, and she tells him to get her some butter. When he presents it to her on a saucer, she looks into his eyes, and—the whole of it, as far as he’s concerned, whistling through the space of that broken tooth—she says, “Who knows? I just might.”
2014, Limbo
Never has the General dispatched a single soldier for glory or sport. His detractors accuse him of spending their brave sons on nothing—when it is he, more than anyone, who values each and every life.
The problem is that his most careful sacrifices still look like recklessness if one ignores a central fact: The General is tasked with fighting their wars.
And wars are fed on men.
They’d used him as scapegoat from the beginning. His own prime minister acting aghast, Ben-Gurion pretending he couldn’t grasp what the General had always, in every battle, made clear. He was fighting to win.
The General would kill ninety and lose nine. He’d recede from a field of battle strewn with dozens of dead, carrying the two who were his back home. No other unit in the world fought with the General’s numbers.
Whipping boy or no, the General’s job has always been to deliver vengeance. They’d hint coyly and speak in hushed tones when they needed something done. And when the General returned? They’d shake their heads and bury their faces in their hands while he stood before them, victorious.
Never did anyone give a direct order. They simply let him loose as if he fought his own private wars.
After every routing and reprisal they’d tell him, You cannot keep winning so well.
“Winning so well?” the General says, and looks to Ben-Gurion, who gives no response. He turns to Dayan, who offers him the eye patch, tilting his seeing side away.
Peres sits silently in a corner; ever the diplomat, he lets the other two men speak on his behalf.
Ben-Gurion says, “They kill one of ours and you run off like Samson to bring back a hundred heads. The world will not take it. The enemy’s losses are too great.”