Thomas’s blonde-bearded face blurred out of the darkness in the bar, framed by the coloured spotlights illuminating the vaulted ceiling. “I have been told that the barman here can procure you a woman.”
Mac stared at him, blinking and blank. When he spoke, his voice was slurred. “Why do you sound Norwegian? What’s up with your accent?”
“I am Norwegian. Jesus, are you that drunk?”
Mac had another sip of his whisky sour. “I cannot believe that a nice old hotel like the American Colony would traffick in women.”
“They don’t traffick in women? Who said they—”
“You just said the barman—”
“There’s a big difference between trafficking in women and procuring a little company for a guy.”
“I don’t see the distinction.”
Thomas settled his elbows on the bar and drank his margarita through a short straw. He glanced about at the noisy crowd of foreign correspondents. It was late and their faces were sweaty with the summer heat and the hysterical shouting of drunken enthusiasms. “I have no idea what I’m talking about. It’s just something that fat guy from CNN told me.”
“He was at the funeral today, out in Issawiya.”
“Was he? Didn’t see him.”
“Yelling into the boom mic about how tensions were rising and blah blah dee blah.”
“Man, you’ve only been here three months and you’re so cynical.”
“I’ve been here long enough to know that no one has the answer.”
“Everyone has the answer. No one wants to give it.”
Mac watched Thomas morph into three Thomases, waited for him to settle into a single image, and said, “I went out to Hebron to see that Hamas guy, the one with the bald head and the shaved upper lip.”
“Sheikh Khaled.”
“He said to me, ‘Tell me, what can we do to improve our image.’ And I said, ‘You could stop blowing people up.’ And he said, ‘No, that is not the correct answer.’
Thomas slapped his hand on the bar and laughed. He twirled his finger for the barman to bring them another round.
“This place drives me crazy,” Mac said. “You’ve been here years. Don’t you end up writing the same news stories over and over again?”
“I change the dateline once in a while.”
“How do you stand it? What’s your secret?”
Thomas leaned toward Mac. He made to speak, then he stood and dragged his stool until it touched Mac’s leg. He settled himself and reached his arm around Mac’s shoulder. “The girls.”
The barman placed a new whisky on a fresh paper mat.
Thomas licked salt from the rim of his margarita. “The sexiest girls in the world. Right here in Jerusalem.”
“They’re not exactly available. Most of them aren’t looking for an American foreign correspondent or a wild Norwegian radio reporter. They want someone from their own culture, their own religion. Christ, they want someone from their own particular sect.”
“Doesn’t matter, man. I’m crazy for the Arab women. Crazy.” He drew out the vowel, his voice low and breathless, as if he could see the woman he wanted before him now. “Particularly the ones who cover everything but their eyes. Those big dark eyes and long lashes. It gives them a sense of mystery. They drive me nuts.”
“I go for the religious Jewish girls.” Mac made his voice comically lecherous. “They have rules of modesty, so they wear those long skirts. But they all wear tight sweaters. Then when they get married, they wear those sexy hats.”
“I do like the little hats.”
“They just can’t help the sexiness sneaking out, even if the rabbis don’t like it. Ah, but we have as much chance of getting in the sack with one of them as Madonna has of negotiating a peace deal.”
They dabbled their fingers against the icy exterior of their glasses and were silent a moment. Then, Thomas said, “Still I’d go for the Arab women.”
“The Israelis, man.”
“It’s a bet. If you can get into bed with a religious Israeli girl before I can score with an Arab girl––”
“Who wears a veil. You were very specific about that.”
“Who wears a veil. If you bed your preference, then you win the bet.”
They shook hands. Mac slid off his bar stool and jerked his thumb in the direction of the toilet.
“I’ll get another one in,” Thomas said.
Mac had gone a few steps before a question occurred to him. He stumbled back to Thomas. “What does the winner of the bet get?”
“He gets laid.”
*****
The next morning at ten, Mac was reading a magazine in the waiting room of a dental office in Talbiya. He winced at the whine of a rotational drill behind one of the closed doors beyond the reception desk. If he told the dental hygienist that he had a hangover, maybe she would clean his teeth without using the wheezing suction pipe and the rumbling electric brush. He turned the page of the magazine. His byline clutched at the bottom of a photo of a Palestinian man weeping over the body of his dead child, as if Mac had caught hold of the grief and let it tow him to another week’s salary. He swallowed queasily and tossed the magazine onto the coffee table. “Blah dee blah blah,” he muttered.
The receptionist called over to him. “Neta’s ready for you.”
Mac got to his feet, blowing slightly, and walked into the hygienist’s office.
The hygienist turned with a businesslike smile from beyond her reclining chair. Mac’s racing, hungover pulse picked up a few beats. Neta was a religious Jew of about forty. She wore a small hat to cover most of her hair and a sweater that reached up to her chin and down to her wrists. But it’s so t-tight around her chest, Mac thought. Even his thought had a stammer of nervous excitement in it.
“Hi, I’m just setting up.” Neta reached past him and took her white coat off the hook on the back of the door. She smelled of pancakes. He imagined her making them for her children that morning. She probably had lots of children, the religious women he interviewed for stories usually did.
Mac touched his hand to his heart, as if he might die right there. He gestured to the wide dental chair. “Can I sit down?”
She worked on his teeth and chatted with him about his parents back in the US. He barely noticed the suction pipe or the drill or the cold sensation around his molars where his gums were receding. She bent over him, her dental mask covering her nose and mouth, her black beret pulled down to within an inch of her brows. He fantasised about being the man to whom she would return each night with her small talk from the lives of a dozen clients whose tartare she had scraped that day. When their kids had gone to bed, they would…make another one. His neighbour, a Jew so secular he went out of his way to eat ham on Jewish fast days, had told Mac that among the religious sex was a mitzvah, commanded by God. Or perhaps procreation was the mitzvah, or both. Or it could have been that it was only when you did it on the Sabbath.
“You can rinse.” Neta pressed a button and water shot in a jet out of a tube into a cup.
Mac levered himself upright. The cup shook in his hand and he spilled. “Sorry,” he said. “A little excited.”
Neta looked confused.
“Nervous, I mean. Dentists, you know.” He filled his mouth with fluid, spat, and watched the flakes of blood swirl in the funnel.
A few minutes later, he leant against the counter as the receptionist ran his credit card payment. Leaflets advertising a teeth-whitening process stood in a cardboard display beside the bowl of cheap plastic gifts for child patients. He made his voice as casual as he could, but even so he had to clear his throat before he could speak. “Does Neta do the teeth-whitening?”
“She does.” The receptionist anticipated the next question, though Mac had no intention of asking it. “It’s eight thousand shekels.”
He calculated the exchange rate in his head. It was a ridiculous sum. “I’d like to come back and do it.”
She scanned her screen for an appointment. “Neta has availability on the—”
“Tomorrow.” His voice was louder than it needed to be. “I’ll come back tomorrow. Really. I—I must.”
The receptionist tipped her head to the side. “Sure. Tomorrow.”
“With Neta, right?”
“Of course.”
He left the dentist’s office, the sunlight lancing directly through his eyeballs and imprinting itself on his hungover brain. No booze for you tonight, buddy, he thought. Got to be sharp for your date—your appointment in the morning. It’s just an appointment.
*****
That evening, Thomas went to the American Colony, hoping to run into Mac. After five margaritas, he forgot his friend and settled into a session of raucous banter and West Bank war stories with a group of visiting correspondents. He stumbled up the stone steps to the toilet, slipping and striking his knee against the worn limestone. “Who put the toilets up the steps? Hell, it’s a stupid place to put a toilet.”
After he peed, he came out into the corridor wincing and, wondering whether his fall might have fractured his patela, decided not to return to the bar by the steps. If he went through the lobby and all the way around the hotel’s central courtyard, he would find himself back in the bar without having to descend any steps. His plan betrayed a drunken lack of architectural logic, but he proceeded into the lobby.
His head filled with the beat of a tambourine. He tapped himself on the ear, as though it might be a fly or some creation of his own brain. Then he realised it emanated from the dining room. He wobbled into the doorway and sneered. It was a scene from a thousand cheap tourist memories. Beyond the buffet, three neat little Palestinian musicians wearing fezes and embroidered waistcoats played a brisk debka. The tourists at their tables drank beer and stared at the dancer. Her back was to them as she jerked her buttocks sharply and rhythmically beneath her gold-spangled gauze trousers.
Thomas felt the call of the tequila and was steadying himself to face the stairs, when the dancer spun around. She wore a headband from which were strung thin gold medallions dropping to her brow. A piece of red silk veiled her nose and mouth. Thomas gasped, his pulse shuddered and, dizzy, he reached for the wall. Her eyes were kohled and her lashes were so long he seemed to feel the electricity breeze over his skin when she fluttered them at him.
And it was he who had become her target. She shimmied between the tables, her arms making arabesques in the air, but always beckoning him. An American at the table closest to him whooped. Thomas whooped too. He danced toward her.
He awoke the next morning with the sun cutting hot through the gap in his shutters. Somehow he had been spared a hangover, though he remembered nothing after the dancing. He had picked up the whooping American’s beer and downed it while he jiggled toward the dancer. He recalled that this had not been the only time during his dance that he had performed that thieving manoeuvre, and it had been received with good humour by the American tour party. He had blacked out, yet now he felt fresh and youthful.
Lying on his side, he surveyed the clothing he must have peeled away before he flopped last night. His balled up socks, his chinos with his underpants still inside them, his shirt prominently stained with red wine. And a string of gold coin medallions and a veil.
He stared and blinked, and he held his breath.
He rolled over. She was beside him. Naked, her breasts fleshy and the nipples dark. Thomas’s jaw shivered uncontrollably. She stretched, shifting her hips up and down as though enacting a slow, luxuriant version of her dance. “Hell,” said Thomas, paralysed with admiration and disbelief. She stroked his cheek and rose from the bed. While she used the toilet, he grabbed his phone and texted Mac: I win.
*****
Mac’s phone alert sounded in his pocket. He smiled flirtatiously at the religious Israeli girl behind the counter of the bakery. She was the fantasy he had described to Thomas at the hotel bar. She wore a long skirt and tight sweater, but unlike Neta she kept her hair uncovered, suggesting she was single.
“A croissant and a cappuccino, please,” said Mac. “Unless you can think of anything even hotter.”
She frowned at him and took his money. He grimaced too at his line. It would have been offensive even had she not been a religious woman. You are such an asshole, man, he told himself. He caught sight of his leer of self-disgust in the mirror behind the counter. His teeth were almost the colour of the pastries in the baskets. Perhaps he needed the expensive whitening, after all.
His coffee appeared on the counter before him. Internally he massaged the grimace into a smile and turned it toward the religious girl. But she had retreated to the other end of the counter. A stern young man withdrew his fingers from Mac’s coffee cup. His beard was bright ginger and soft on his cheeks, because it had never been shaved. He wore his talit katan over his white shirt, instead of beneath it as most religious men did. It was a sartorial gesture denoting some kind of extra degree of orthodoxy that was too arcane for Mac to understand. The young man leaned forward, his posture and eyes hostile, and he tossed Mac’s change across the counter. With resignation Mac picked up the change and dropped it into the plastic cup for tips by the register. Sexist dickhead tax, he thought.
Mac took his coffee and the pastry in its white paper bag and left the bakery. The girl stared at him through the window, her arms folded under her breasts. As he fished out his car keys, he read Thomas’s message.With a bitter grin, he typed a reply: Well done. I have a date with a religious Jewish woman right now anyway. Neta would be waiting.
*****
The belly dancer’s phone rang just as Mac’s reply bleeped into Thomas’s phone. Still sleepy, she answered. “Shalom, motek. Ma koreh? Ma inyanim?”
Thomas spoke about as much of the local languages as most foreign correspondents. Which was not much. But he knew what shalom meant. When, after less than a minute of drowsy conversation, she hung up, he said: “That was Hebrew?”
“That’s right, baby.” She tossed aside her phone and moved onto him. Her breasts lay on his ribs like softly gloved hands.
He vibrated with lust, but first he needed to know. “It wasn’t Arabic you were speaking?”
“No, baby.”
“It was Hebrew. You’re Israeli?”
She fluttered her lashes against his cheek. “Palestinian women wouldn’t show their bodies the way I do, when I dance. They’re much too conservative.”
Her kiss was deep and she took his penis in her hand. “Lucky for you, I’m liberal.”
Thomas made noises like a man shivering in extreme cold as her eyes lit up his body. “Wait,” he said, reaching towards the clothes beside the bed. “Put on your veil.”
*****
Mac presented himself at the reception of the dental office.
“For the whitening, right?” The receptionist scanned her screen and tapped on her keyboard.
“With Neta.” Mac’s tone was demanding and a little desperate. He sipped his coffee. Be casual, he told himself.
The receptionist gave him a brief, examining glance before she returned to her screen. “Neta’s sick today.”
He choked and dribbled coffee. “When can I come back?
“You don’t need to come back. We have another hygienist. Jana will see you in a minute.”
“Is Jana religious?”
The receptionist opened her mouth, as though she might be about to ask why a foreigner who was patently not Jewish would care about the religious observance of his dental hygienist. Instead, she said, “No, she’s a Russian.” She looked him up and down with a quiet, mocking smile.
Mac knew what “Russian” meant in Jerusalem. It signified an origin in the immigration of the Nineties after the Berlin Wall came down. It also suggested likely rejection of religious strictures. “Russian” meant no tight sweater, no little hat. Jana was not forbidden.
Nor was the receptionist finished with him. “Is religion important to you? All our toothpastes are kosher.”
Mac’s laugh was as hollow as his heart. As he turned away from the receptionist to take his seat in the waiting area his face collapsed into a mask of pure suffering. He unwrapped his pastry and chewed it miserably until the receptionist called him. “You can go in now.”
He shoved the crunchy tail of the croissant into his mouth and sloped toward the hygienist’s room. He opened the door with a sigh.
The woman who turned to him had a short black bob shot through with purple dye. In her blotchy, ruddy face, a jet stone twinkled on her nose and she wore black lipstick. Her cheeks jowled down towards her thick neck and her heavy body filled her white coat.
But when she smiled, Mac felt as though he had been kissed. She reached out a pudgy hand. “You have a bit of pastry in your teeth.” She touched his mouth and removed the sliver of croissant.
The coffee cup slipped in Mac’s hand. He grabbed at it to catch it. “Sorry, sorry,” he said. “I was just—”
She put the flake of pastry in her mouth and licked her lips.
He extended his heel backward and pushed the door shut.
THE END
Trump and French Philosophy