And why had she not yet called, the whore? There was no way she was still asleep. Was he so insignificant as to not be worth a phone call? But there was really no reason for her not to call. No reason at all for her to be suspicious, unless she had woken up while he rifled through her date book and her cell phone — but there was no chance of that. She had been asleep. He’d made sure of it. There was no reason that he could think of for her to be suspicious of him. Maybe the fact that he left the house on his day off and at such an early hour was enough to make her think that something dreadful had happened. Maybe she had left the house, taken the kids, and run away to the village of her birth. That notion troubled him, and he became certain that that was what she had done. He began dialing her number, sure she would ignore his call, imagining her in her new car, fleeing from him. And maybe she would answer, throwing the truth in his face as she drove. Her words would drip with derision and his children, seated in the backseat, would hear just what their beloved mother thought of their father. They were capable of believing her, the lawyer thought, shaking his head.
“Hello,” she answered, and her voice revealed that she had been up. “Where are you?”
The lawyer was glad that she had answered. Her tone soothed him.
“Are you awake?” he asked, trying to hide the tremor in his voice.
“Yes,” she said, “why, have your kids ever let me sleep in? What’s going on, why are you calling?”
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“I mean, why are you calling me from downstairs,” she asked, chuckling. “Why don’t you just come up?”
“I’m in the office.”
“What? Why? Is something wrong?”
“No, nothing, I just woke up early and I have a ton of work.”
“Oh, wow, I’m such an idiot. I thought you were asleep,” she said, laughing. “I’ve been shushing the kids all morning.”
“Ha,” the lawyer grunted, trying to join her laughter.
“Will you be stuck in the office for a long time?”
“I’m not sure. I can’t really tell yet.”
“Oh, God, now we’re not going to see you on Fridays, either? Enough! You’re killing yourself! You’re coming for lunch, though, right?”
“What? Ah, I’ll see when I’m done here.”
The lawyer relaxed. It was clear she really had thought he had been sleeping downstairs. Of all the possible scenarios, he had forgotten to take the most logical one into account. After all, he always stayed in bed on his days off, until long after the house had come to life. Why should his wife have thought that this day was any different?
“Don’t be late, okay?” she asked, her tone convincing. “And also, don’t forget that I’m going over to Diana’s tonight.”
“I won’t,” the lawyer said, lying, having totally forgotten that she was supposed to go out with a few friends from work to see one of their colleagues and her one-month-old baby. Again he felt the gloom cloud his mind. The visit now seemed like a thin and feeble cover story.
“All right,” he said, feeling his voice shake, “I should get going. I’ll talk to you later. I’m not sure how long I’ll have to stay here.” He realized that this was the night to catch her in the act.
The lawyer hurried over to the Xerox machine and made copies of the note he’d found in the book and the sample of her handwriting from her bag. He went over to Samah’s desk, took a sheet of stationery with the office letterhead on it, and wrote out a request for an analysis from the graphologist. He made clear that he did not need an official report, as he sometimes did, but merely a verdict on whether the two notes were written by the same hand. The lawyer added that the matter was urgent and that he would like the results ASAP, and then he underlined ASAP twice and left his cell phone number just in case. Standing by the fax machine, waiting for it to start to ring, he looked at his watch and knew he was sending it off to an empty office. It was not yet seven in the morning.
The lawyer walked back to his office and stashed the two notes in his attaché case. He prayed that the graphologist would rule that the two samples did not match. He imagined the man telling him that one of the notes was a forgery or that the two samples were remarkably similar but in no way the same. His heart would be flooded with warmth and he’d run out of the office and buy his wife the most expensive present he’d ever bought her and then go home and kiss her and hug her and whisper the kind of sweet nothings he had not uttered in a long while.
He stood by the window and looked out at King George Street. A supply truck rumbled down the empty street. Jewish men in white shirts and black hats walked past under the window, clutching their tefillin in velvet bags that looked like black pillows, adorned with gold and silver thread. All of a sudden the lawyer was sorry he had left the house without saying good-bye to his kids, without kissing his daughter and tickling his little son’s stomach until he laughed the way only babies do. He sat down at his desk, looked at his computer, and scrolled through the morning’s headlines on one of the many news sites. Then he went to Google and asked it to search for why women cheat.
The lawyer read through the results avidly, attaching scientific importance to the most superficial of claims, even the ones that appeared in the glossiest, most shallow publications. He was furious when he found out that women cheat nearly as often as men. The rationale was different: they wanted attention, empathy, and support, and when the husband did not provide those things, they sought them elsewhere. According to one article, women seek sexual satisfaction outside the house because their husbands are often tired and uninterested, just as their own sexuality hits full stride. A sexologist said that her years of therapy had taught her that women want to feel attractive and desirable and that all too often their husbands see them differently, as caretakers of the children and the home. Other women sought wealth — gourmet restaurants, diamonds, invitations to glittering parties. Private eyes weighed in on the matter, too, and said that from their experience female adulterers were far more cautious than their male counterparts. Marriage counselors agreed: women are more discreet, and they are better liars.
The lawyer fit all of these facts to his own situation. He went from site to site, feeling more humiliated than ever before. Going back to the search page, he typed in the word hymen and soon enough realized that his assumption that his wife had been a virgin when they got married was utterly baseless. He read all about hymenoplasties and how immensely simple and popular the procedure had become. He read about blood capsules that could be surgically inserted so as to satisfy the groom’s mother, too, on the wedding night. The notion that she had fooled him from day one was more painful than the subsequent betrayal. The lawyer had never thought that the matter of his wife’s virginity was important to him, but now he learned that it was, more so than anything else in the world. He remembered how he’d always told his friends that he pitied all those Arab men who said they would never date a girl who had a boyfriend. What an idiot he had been then, during those conversations, and what an idiot he was now. Only recently he had sat with a friend, the accountant, and laughed at him for saying that he was worried about the Arab-Jewish education he was giving his daughter because he was afraid that as she approached puberty she would think, like the Jews, that it was only natural to have sex before marriage. The lawyer could not say why his opinions and beliefs, the things he had thought to be a result of his nature, had changed so rapidly. Experience had taught him that he was a conservative. Yes, a conservative, and from now on he would not be apologetic about it. What an idiot he had been when he spoke out, time and again, against the treatment of women in the Arab world, saying that it was widespread misogyny that held those societies back. What an idiot he had been, quoting Israeli writers and leaders. It was not the financial situation, he had said, parroting those public intellectuals, not the occupation, not the rotten education system, but simply the treatment of women. Only now did he realize that their goal had been to bring ruin to Arab society. Only now, for the first time in his life, did he understand what honor meant. He, who spoke out against and even lectured now and again about honor killings, he, who opposed the phenomenon and labeled it barbaric, only now saw the error of his ways. He wished someone from her family would kill her. But who would do it? Which of her married brothers would risk arrest and a life of destitution for his children? He wished she was dead. But what about the kids, he wondered, and his heart broke at the thought of them mourning their mother.