The lawyer decided to take ten books now and come back on Sunday for ten more. By then, though, the volumes would be dispersed throughout the store, sorted by language, topic, and name of the author.
PSYCHOANALYSIS
The lawyer was hunched over his desk, boring into the ten books he had bought. He found nothing. Maybe the notes had stuck to the pages, he thought, and flipped through them again, more carefully, caressing each page with the palm of his hand, looking for little slips of paper.
His wife called in the middle of the day and the lawyer, hunting for evidence, answered her as he always did when he was immersed in a client’s case. “No, no,” he said in response to her questions, “I’m really busy right now and I won’t make it home for lunch. I don’t know when I’ll be back. No, not late. Okay, ’bye.”
Who is this Yonatan, the lawyer wondered, leaning back in his large leather chair, and why would she be writing to him in Arabic? The chances of a Jew knowing how to speak Arabic were slim, and the chances of him reading and writing the language were even slimmer. What’s more, there was not a single book in Arabic among those boxes. Yonatan was probably one of those Jews who chose to major in Arabic in high school so that he could get into a top intelligence unit in the army. But he knew it was still more likely that she would have written to him in Hebrew, since her Hebrew was perfect and there was no reason for her to make it difficult for him with her swirling, calligraphic Arabic. Unless, of course, it was part of their attraction, one of the games they played with each other, the lawyer thought, and just like that the evidence before him became personal. Maybe Yonatan is one of those Jews who’s always saying he wants to learn Arabic, and his wife, Yonatan’s lover, had decided to teach it to him the hard way. If he wanted to understand the depths of her love, he’d have to learn her mother tongue. Maybe it was a sort of seduction. Maybe they both wanted to be loved by the proverbial Other. Just a few hours earlier, the lawyer had read that thrill seeking was one of the chief causes of infidelity.
For some reason the notion that his wife’s lover was Jewish was a relief to the lawyer. A lover from a different world, who would not talk behind their backs to anyone they might know — there was no doubt that this mitigated the crime of her betrayal. A Jew, especially an Ashkenazi Jew, would just be cheating, not trampling the lawyer’s honor. A Jewish lover seemed like his wife’s problem; an Arab lover was a disgrace. “He only stole from Jews”—that was a sentence he heard often in his line of work. That’s what relatives would say when trying to prove that the arrested man was moral, because the Jews had a different set of laws and it wasn’t really theft when the property belonged to them. It didn’t even mean that much to the Jews, they said, because they were covered, they had insurance, they had savings accounts. Stealing a car from a Jew was more of a loan or a return to the original owners than a real sin that demanded punishment.
But it was also possible that her lover was an Arab like him, one who frequented used bookstores, and that he, too, had bought a book that had been signed by the same Yonatan. Or maybe it was the other way around, maybe the Jew, Yonatan, had bought a used book with no name in it and he had signed his name into a book sold to the store by the Arab lover. After all, other than the one note he had found in The Kreutzer Sonata the lawyer had not seen any evidence of correspondence. This seemed like the most likely scenario. His wife had gone out of her way to tell him about The Kreutzer Sonata. Why that book? She didn’t care about literature at all. She had said that all of her classmates in the supplementary course about psychoanalytic theory were crazy about the book, but maybe she had just said that to cover up for a slip of the tongue. Maybe, the lawyer thought, The Kreutzer Sonata had just been a favorite of her lover’s. He regretted not knowing who she had studied with, whether there were other Arabs in the class or not. The details of her professional and academic life had never seemed interesting to him and, judging by the income they generated, they had seemed more like a game than a career, a hobby that he encouraged so that she would have other things in her life aside from the house and the kids. It had to be an Arab classmate, the lawyer decided, a classmate who had heard about the book and then sold it to the bookstore, where Yonatan bought it and took it home without knowing that it held an Arabic love letter between its pages. Maybe Yonatan took the little slip of paper with the hieroglyphic letters and used it as a bookmark.
And maybe the Arab was not a classmate but a professor, an intellectual who wooed his wife with his knowledge and the fraudulent sensitivity that is second nature to psychoanalysts. Perhaps part of the seduction had been his instructing her which books to read, putting The Kreutzer Sonata on his short list. But why would a professor, who certainly made an adequate salary, sell his book secondhand? Maybe it was a fellow student after all.
Ideally it would be a Jew, the lawyer thought again. Aside from the shame and the fear that his wife’s betrayal would become the topic of the day among his peers, the lawyer hated the fact that his wife was cheating on him with someone who read books. The ancient smell of the pages told him that while he had read The Kreutzer Sonata by chance, her lover, whomever he might be, had read it long before. The lover, who had seemed like a bloodthirsty wolf seeking nothing but the lawyer’s humiliation, now seemed bookish, bespectacled, sensitive, and gentle, the kind of man who listened carefully to the lawyer’s wife, understood her, supported her, embraced her. The lawyer no longer saw her in the middle of wild unabashed lovemaking. Instead she ran to her lover and took refuge in his arms while he stroked her back.
The lawyer, unable to remember the last time he’d felt tears on his cheeks, cried himself to sleep on his desk.
TUNA SANDWICH
He woke up to the sound of the phone. The office was dark and it took him a few moments to figure out where he was. He turned on the reading lamp above his desk, looked at the clock on the wall, and saw that it was already after six.
“I don’t believe it,” his wife said, when he answered the phone. “Are you still at work?”
“I fell asleep,” he said. “I still have some more work to do.”
“It’s Friday. The kids have been asking for you all day. Enough with the work, you’re killing yourself.”
“Okay,” the lawyer said. “I’ll be home soon.”
“Soon doesn’t matter,” she said, “I’m late. I’m going to send the kids over to Nili’s, all right?”
“Okay,” he said. “I’ll pick them up if I get home before you. How long do you think you’re going to be at Diana’s?”
“No more than an hour,” she said. “I’ll call and see where you are when I’m done there, okay?”
“Sure,” he said. “Sounds good.”
“Have you eaten?”
“Yes,” the lawyer said, recalling that since the previous night’s dinner he hadn’t had a thing besides coffee.