Angling for Love

Matkot—an Israeli beach game (known as Kadima in the U.S.), played with a short-handled racquet (matka) and a squash ball. Using a paddle, two or more players hit the ball back and forth as many times as possible without dropping it. Considered Israel’s national sport, it has no boundaries and no rules; the only goal is to keep the ball in the air.

Jacky gets there first, before the rest of the matkot players. He combs the beach in front of the five-star Tel Aviv hotels before the chair attendants come to work. He finds one or two, sometimes even three abandoned white plastic chairs, and drags each through the sand. His thin body, bent and stooped by his seventy-eight years, moves slowly. He knows no one will thank him but he doesn’t mind. He likes to think he’s doing something useful. He lines up the chairs at the meeting point, sits down, and takes out the sandwich of leftover grilled eggplant and tahini that he packed before leaving home in Pardes Katz to catch the number eighty-two bus for the thirty-minute ride to the beach. Today, he has a change of clothes in his backpack for the excursion with Dalia. Not that it matters. It’s not like she’s interested in him or anything.

As he eats his breakfast and waits for Dalia and the others, he gazes out at the sea, which is like liquid mercury so early in the day. These are the moments when he feels rich, when he doesn’t think about the wife who left him, the daughter who won’t talk to him, and his Russian almost-girlfriend, Valeriya, who agrees to go dancing with him, and lets him pay for her groceries but won’t sleep with him. His beach chums call him a frier—a sucker—at least he shouldn’t buy her groceries, they tell him. He knows they’re right. But he also knows what it’s like not to have money. So he gives her a fifty-shekel bill and asks her to buy him a container of milk that costs six shekels, knowing she’ll keep the change. He likes how rich it makes him feel, that he can let her cheat him, even if it means he is a frier. Can you be a frier if you know you’re a frier? Why is everyone so worried about being a frier?  Besides, they don’t call him a frier when he brings them the chairs.

He always gives up his seat for the ladies, even though most of them don’t give him the time of day. Over the years, he has asked every woman, as soon as she starts to play matkot with the group, to go dancing with him. Even if she’s a lousy player, even if she isn’t pretty. None have agreed.

He loves to dance, especially salsa. Dance is a prelude to love. And he would love to have love. All his life, the more he wanted it, the less he got, especially from his ex-wife, Annika, a Dutch volunteer at a kibbutz whom he had picked up at the beach when they were both in their late twenties. She had a thing for dark men, so she liked that about him. And she was a good dancer.

He followed her to Amsterdam. But no matter how nice he was to her, she bossed him around and never respected him. She probably never loved him either, but they had danced well together for a while, long enough for her to get pregnant and have a baby. And then she left him, and he was kicked out of Holland, which he didn’t mind, because without Annika and the baby there was no reason to stay in that cold, rainy country with its impossible language. His daughter, Hannah, became ultra-religious and calls him on Jewish holidays from Antwerp but doesn’t want her children to meet him, afraid he will infect them with his godless ways.

He looks out at the sea. It fills him with bittersweet longing, not only for Hannah and the family life he doesn’t have. He has never stopped looking for a woman who would understand his soul, appreciate his keen powers of observation. He wishes there were someone to laugh with, hug, kiss, adore.

He is contemplating this when Simcha shows up at 7:10. He doesn’t particularly like Simcha, but Simcha is a good player and comes every day. He acts like he’s better than Jacky, goes on about his PhD in physics and the money he made from something he invented forty years ago for the defense industry that he can’t talk about. There’s loads Simcha doesn’t talk about, which is why Jacky doesn’t trust him. But he knows Simcha doesn’t even have an almost-girlfriend, and he’s always trying to stop the women that go by when the gang plays matkot. Especially if they are pretty and their butt cheeks, peeking out under their bikinis, are nice and firm. It annoys Jacky, the way Simcha asks women to get the ball when it lands near their feet as they stroll by, the way he calls out “thanks, motek (sweetie)” if they pick up the ball and toss it to him. Then he tries to chat them up, suggests they join the game, but he’s obnoxious, and bottom line, he never succeeds in getting them to play.

Jacky is glad Simcha fails at attracting new women to the group but also wishes Simcha would succeed. Simcha’s the same age as Jacky, and his face is all wrinkled, but unlike Jacky, Simcha still has some hair, and he is tall, and therefore more impressive. If the women would agree to play, they might get to know Jacky, and maybe one of them would see into his kind heart and maybe go dancing with him, maybe even sleep with him, be his girlfriend, not an almost-girlfriend, and bring him all the change if he asks her to buy him a carton of milk. And if not, if any of the good-lookers joined, he’d at least get to watch their boobs bop up and down as they stretch to reach the ball in their bikinis or high-cut  one-pieces (sexier, in his opinion), and that would be fine too. It would be something.

Dalia joined them on her own. She watched them play and asked if she could learn. She was an awful player at first but today she’s terrific. She gets along with Simcha. They talk about books and all the places they have each traveled. But Simcha hasn’t made any moves on Dalia. At least as far as Jacky knows. Simcha says he’s screwed up every relationship he’s had—so maybe he’s decided starting up with Dalia would ruin a nice friendship. If Dalia and Jacky were to get together, Jacky would never screw things up with her, he just knows he wouldn’t. Whatever she’d want, he’d make it work.

Simcha says good morning in a booming, too-cheerful voice. “What a gorgeous day,” he adds with one of his self-satisfied sighs and sits down in a plastic chair, alongside Jacky. Simcha sips his coffee, Jacky wraps up the remaining half of his sandwich and stores it in his backpack for later, and they both gaze out silently at the sea, now turning turquoise-blue near the shore and paling as it melds with the horizon. A light wind ripples the waves. It’s as if the sea has goosebumps, Jacky thinks, and he’s enchanted by this thought, by his originality. He’s always had a good imagination, he’s always tried to look at the world a bit askew, just to amuse himself and others.

It served him well for the forty years he worked as a diamond polisher. The work at the Ramat Gan diamond exchange was tedious. Letting his mind take flight while he cut the diamonds to maximize their brilliance and minimize the visibility of their flaws had staved off some of the boredom.

Now that he’s retired, he still likes to exercise his imagination, come up with funny, quirky thoughts. Maybe he’ll use the goosebump image on his Facebook page, where he writes stories and sometimes poems or random musings, and even has some followers, although not many. And he must tell Benji about it.

Benji always laughs at Jacky’s turn of phrases, at his observations. And he’s the only one of the gang who follows Jacky on Facebook, although he tells Jacky that most of the postings are corny. But once in a while, Benji gets a good laugh from what Jacky writes or says, slaps him on the back, and says, “There’s no one like you, Jacky. You’re one of a kind.” Unlike Simcha who is never impressed by anything Jacky says and leaves his empty coffee cup on the beach and doesn’t even say thanks when Jacky throws the paper cup into the garbage for him.

Benji is the star player. Life has been better since he joined the group a few years ago. He’s a lot younger than the others—in his early fifties. But he likes to play with them, and he’s made them all better players, because they make an effort for him. Benji likes to kid around and say that they are training for the matkot Olympics. Of course, there are no tournaments for matkot. There are no rules, and no winners and no losers. Dalia says it’s like Israeli politics. Everyone just gives everyone a hard time with tough balls, while still trying to keep the ball in the air. It’s the ultimate non-competitive game. You can’t have a tournament with a sport like that.

But if there were a tournament, their team would be called “The Try-Hards” because they do their best. Especially with Benji, even if some, like Simcha, pretend that he doesn’t need to, that it all comes easy to him, except when his arm hurts. Jacky’s arm hurts, too, sometimes, from playing too much. So when Simcha plays with his left hand, to give his right hand a rest, Jacky, who is left-handed, plays with his right hand to give his left hand a rest. Benji is the one who taught them both to play with their less dominant hand, and he’s patient and sends the ball to exactly the right place so they can return it easily. Benji always asks Simcha about the soccer and basketball scores of their favorite teams, which doesn’t interest Jacky at all, and he always asks Jacky how he’s feeling and whether he went dancing, which doesn’t interest Simcha at all.

And then, as if Jacky’s thinking of Benji magically summoned him, Benji arrives, pushing his bicycle through the sand, a helmet cocked at an angle on his head, covering his brown curls, his orange shorts slipping low on his narrow hips so that the crack in his ass shows by the time he parks his bike.

“Good morning, guys,” Benji says. “What are you waiting for? Simcha, keep some of that coffee for later. Jacky, stop dreaming of love. Or are you dreaming of your hot date with Dalia, heh!”

“What, you have a date with Dalia?” Simcha looks at Jacky with interest for the first time Jacky can ever remember.

Jacky tries to throw out a nonchalant laugh, but it comes out more like a giggle. “It’s not that kind of date. We’re just going to the Tel Aviv Museum later.”

“You don’t say,” Simcha raises an eyebrow. His surprise is somehow insulting.

“She’s trying to turn you into a culture vulture or something,” says Benji. “Yalla, let’s play. I don’t have much time, got to go to work at 8:45.”

Jacky gets up. His shit-kickers sink into the sand, slowing him down as he gets into place across from Benji. “Jacky, you move like a snail with those boots.” Benji shakes his head. Benji has tried to convince Jacky to go barefoot, but Jacky doesn’t like sand between his toes. So he wears boots, even in the summer.

Simcha turns on his blaster to Israeli golden oldies from the ’60s and ’70s, and he, too, gets into place, singing along to the music, off-key, which is hugely annoying, but no one has been able to get him to stop, not even Benji, no matter how much they all beg him. Jacky and Simcha stand next to each other on one side. Benji, across from them, hits the ball to each of them in turn, swirling, curving, lurching forward to keep the ball in the air, reeling backwards when necessary, returning every ball they send his way.

“They predicted rain, but those weather forecasters don’t know anything,” says Benji as he bats the ball to Jacky.

“Yeah, there’s a nice breeze today,” Jacky says, and then, seeing his opening and acting as if the phrase just came to him, “It makes the sea ripple—as if it has goosebumps.”

“What the heck are you talking about—goosebumps?” retorts Benji, bashing the ball.

“Like the sea feels cold, from the wind, so it gets goosebumps, ripples,” Jacky explains, laughing, as he returns the volley.

“Really?” says Benji. “Goosebumps? You have one heck of an imagination, Jacky, God help us,” he says, sending the ball hurling.

Jacky can’t tell whether Benji is admiring or ridiculing him. Maybe both. Benji is like that. Jacky sails the ball back to Benji, who then whacks it to Simcha and the bong, bong, bong of the small black ball hitting their carbon-fiber rackets back and forth, ten, twenty, thirty times, sounds like a metronome measuring the morning.

Jacky feels on a riff.  He likes his goosebump metaphor. He’s on the brink of impressing Benji. He feels it. Another metaphor pops into his head.

“It’s better to think of the ripples as goosebumps. Otherwise, I think of them as the flesh of old women’s thighs,” says Jacky, pleased with himself.

“Ichs, spare me, spare all of us,” says Simcha.

“Jacky, enough. You’re going to ruin the ocean for us forever with your imagination,” says Benji. He sends the ball to Jacky, who misses it. “You should stretch a little harder to reach the ball and stop thinking so much,” he adds.

Out of the corner of his eye, Jacky sees Moshe approaching. Which is good and bad. Moshe gets along with everyone and he’s a good player, never gets angry or flustered, and always has a smile on his face, like now, when he wishes everyone a good morning. You wouldn’t expect a man who spent his youth hiding from the Nazis in the forests of Romania, and stayed alive by scavenging for food, to always sport a smile. But he does. As far as Jacky can tell, Moshe doesn’t seem to have much of a bad conscience about denying food to his cousin, who died in the forest from hunger as a result. Moshe never talks about the war, except once to Benji, which is how Jacky knows. One never knows about people, even ones like Moshe, who never says a mean word and seems content, happy to be at the beach in the morning, and who then goes home to play bridge with the wife and visit with the grandchildren in the late afternoon. If Jacky had found himself starving in the forests of Romania, he is pretty sure he would have shared his food with his cousin and then died. And his cousin would probably never even have remembered Jacky’s sacrifice.

Jacky guesses he should feel lucky he’d never had to scavenge for food in a Romanian forest, but it’s not like he had an easy childhood in the barrack-like slums of Lod where his family settled when they arrived from Iraq in the 1950s. It had been filthy dirty there, with never enough food for their family of nine. When he heard from a social worker that he could become a yeled chutz—a foster kid taken in by a kibbutz and brought up there—he’d grabbed the chance as soon as he could, when he was ten. All those kibbutniks treated him with what they thought was kindness, but which was more like pity, letting him know that they thought he was never going to amount to anything. And if by some chance he did, it would be because of all the good education they had bestowed on him. Maybe if he hadn’t been a yeled chutz, he wouldn’t have grown up to be a frier.

Moshe was too old to be a yeled chutz by the time he got to Israel. He became a bus driver. Moshe is ninety-three and, out of respect for his age, he gets first dibs on Benji. Which means that Jacky will end up playing only with Simcha. While Moshe gets out his racket and takes off his down jacket, revealing a blue plaid shirt, its shade the same as his eyes, Jacky considers his options.

Rather than play only with Simcha, he could say his arm hurts, which it does, and that he needs to take a break from playing, and instead of playing with Simcha he could go for a walk along the shore for a while. By the time he comes back, maybe some other players would show up.

Yes, he’ll take a walk along the shore. As he does, he thinks about the 3D immersive Monet exhibit he went to see a month ago. He has always liked art and beautiful things. That’s why he became a diamond polisher. He loves things that glisten, like the rippling sea, things that make his soul sing, and the Monet exhibit did that. It was like he was in Monet’s head. Ever since he saw that exhibit, he has been looking at Monet’s art online in the evenings, whenever he doesn’t feel like going dancing. 

He told Dalia about the show, how much he loved it. Dalia, a retired English teacher, is always trying to improve him, to improve everyone. She tries to get Benji to pull up his shorts so the crack in his ass doesn’t show, and she has been trying to get Jacky to go see her shiatsu therapist for his arm, rather than getting more cortisone shots. She’s well-meaning, but he can never tell whether she’s patronizing him, because she’s sort of a snob like Simcha. After Jacky told her how much he loved that Monet exhibit, she kept hounding him to take out a membership at the Tel Aviv Museum. Only one hundred thirty-five shekels a year for seniors. And you can go to the museum anytime. And it’s right on his way home from the beach, catch one bus there and one from the museum directly home to Pardes Katz, she insisted. So he told her he would go if she came with him the first time. He was surprised when she agreed. He’s not sure why she did. Probably she’s not sure why she did either. She’s one of those types who seems very self-confident. So much so, that she wears the same clothes to the beach every morning. Like she doesn’t care that people, Jacky at least, wonder how often she washes that tattered t-shirt and those gray capri jogging pants that are so unattractive on her. It’s boring that she, and Simcha, too, wear the same clothes every day.

Jacky likes to have style, he likes color, so he wears his green bathing trunks with pink flamingos one day, and the trunks with the many-colored balloons the next, and the ones with lions and tigers in a jungle print the third day. The trunks are cheap, from the shuk, so why not have more than one or two? And he has brightly colored T-shirts to wear with each. It’s nice to dress nice. He doesn’t understand people who don’t. He doubts Dalia will wear her ugly gray capri jogging pants to the museum, so maybe today he’ll get to see her in something a bit more becoming. She’s in her late sixties and she probably used to be pretty. She has penetrating blue eyes, but they are hidden under heavy eyelids. He told her once she should get some plastic surgery and have those lids fixed. She laughed him off. Jacky doesn’t understand women who don’t take care of themselves. She really should get her eyes fixed, and while she’s at it, she should dye her hair more often. She lets the gray show too much.

When Jacky returns from his walk, he sees that Dalia has arrived and is playing with her friend Tsila. Benji is taking a cigarette break and Simcha is taking an arm break. So Jacky joins the women, Dalia on one side, he and Tsila on the other and the ball bonks along nicely, each one of them making an effort. It’s friendly, although Jacky can’t help but feel that the two women would be happier playing without him. Well, he would rather have played just with Dalia, and not with Tsila who is seventy-four and has lots of wrinkles, which he really hates in a woman. And she talks too much, chatting with Dalia about how annoyed she is that she has been recruited to drive her granddaughter to horseback riding lessons and will have to forgo her usual swim. He barely listens.

“Are you two really going to the museum, today?” Tsila asks Dalia.

“Yup,” Dalia says.

“Well, that should be fun,” Tsila snickers. But Jacky forces the hurt out of his mind, replacing it with the thought that soon Tsila will leave, which she does. Then Dalia goes off to the changing room to put on street clothes.

While he waits for her outside, he pulls his burgundy jeans over his pink flamingo bathing suit and switches his green cotton T-shirt for an ivory-colored button-up shirt. Dalia emerges in black pants and a beige cowl-necked top. She’s even wearing earrings. Nice, he thinks.

She leads the way to the bus. He pays attention to the stops. They pass Dizengoff Center and cross Ibn Gvirol Street. Jacky tries to entertain Dalia during the ride. He tries out his goosebump metaphor on her and she rolls her eyes under those lids that she should have fixed with plastic surgery.

He would like her to like him. The first time she played, it must have been about five years ago, he asked her for her phone number. She ignored him pointedly for a long time after that. Maybe she was offended that he hadn’t bothered to get to know her before asking for her phone number, or even asked if she was married, which she was back then. But there’s no point in wasting time. Either a woman wants action or she doesn’t. It makes sense to figure that out fast. It’s true that he’s about ten years older and a lot shorter than she is. She’s been a widow for a year now, so maybe this is his chance. And he’s in good shape. All the parts necessary to make a woman happy still work just fine. Too bad he doesn’t get many chances to prove it.

Dalia said their stop was coming up, but he didn’t see the museum. They had to walk a block to the next parallel street. Jacky looked around to make sure he would know how to find his way there if he ever came alone. He would come alone. Why not? Once he got used to the museum, and knew his way around, sure he would.

The museum is huge when they walk into it. He gets the membership. Dalia already has one. Past the ticket attendant, they go up a ramp to a huge room with lots of paintings, including some by Monet. But they are disappointing, not nearly as awe-inspiring as the 3D exhibition. There are other paintings, and some of them he likes, and he tells Dalia which ones and she seems interested in what he has to say about each one. Here the light is special, there it’s the expression on a woman’s face, and in a third he is captivated by the way the artist depicts the rain.

He wonders if something might happen with Dalia after all. She’s being unusually attentive to him. She may even be having a good time, but he’s not sure if that’s because she’s a teacher by nature and she thinks she’s improving him and that makes her happy, or if it’s because, maybe, she’s attracted to him, is seeing him in a new light. As they are about to leave the museum, he beams at her and gives her an especially appreciative, intense gaze. She smiles warmly at him. Maybe he really does have a chance. She seems to understand that he has an artistic sensibility.

“Come,” she says.  She walks him by the same huge painting that they passed on their way in. It’s about two stories high and dominates the entrance hall, a confusing sort of painting, corrugated. He looks at it straight on. It doesn’t seem to be about much of anything.

She walks him to the right of the painting. “Look,” she says. And he sees that the painting now shows defined geometric shapes all in solid colors, none of the chaos there was when he was standing directly in front of it. She walks him slowly from one side of the painting to the other, and with each step the painting changes, the geometric shapes break up, then some black and white shows, and—when one stands all the way to the left—it is only in black and white, solid geometric shapes. Amazing. In its own way, as marvelous as the 3D Monet exhibit. His heart lifts.

“It’s an Agam,” Dalia explains. “Yaacov Agam, the same guy who designed that old fountain at Dizengoff Plaza. He invented what is known as kinetic art.”  Jacky isn’t really listening to her, he’s too entranced by the painting. He walks back and forth in front of it several times, watching it transform as he moves from one side to the other. He must tell Benji about this painting. How it is sometimes black and white, sometimes full of geometric shapes in color. Every time he moves a step to the right or left, it’s different, but it’s still the same. You don’t know how it will change from moment to moment. Sometimes it’s like dancing, sometimes like walking on the beach, sometimes like playing matkot, sometimes it’s like a metaphor he makes up that Benji likes and sometimes like a metaphor that’s so raunchy, everyone groans. Sometimes it’s like being a frier, sometimes like knowing you’re better than everyone else because you don’t mind people calling you a frier for being kind and caring.

“Will you come with me to the museum again? Or go dancing with me?” he asks Dalia, right there in front of the painting.

“Jacky, really! What’s gotten into you? I bring you to the museum and you get all sorts of ideas!”

He hides his disappointment by looking back at the painting and walks by it again. It seems he and Dalia are like the painting from the extreme left side, just black and white. No color. It’s all a matter of how one looks. He walks to the other side. He loves how the other side has color. It’s inspiring, cheerful, hopeful. One has to keep looking, checking out the angles. He just hasn’t found the right angle yet, the right angle for love.