He signalled the waitress for the bill. Jackie grabbed it, as he’d hoped, and tipped massively - two-thirds of the actual tally. He helped the fat fool down from her stool, noting the expression of beatific benevolence which the drunken dupe inevitably wore when spreading her rapidly-dwindling wealth. She was so dim, he reflected, that she even tipped better for bad service than for good because - get this - she ‘felt sorry for them, being so bad at their jobs.’ Did she ever read her own deathless prose, the semi-conscious sot-pot?
‘Toda raba! Thank you!’ the waitress called after them.
‘You’re welcome! I was a waitress once!’ Jackie called over her shoulder as Dov dragged her out before she could make an even fatter fool of herself. Why did she lie like this, to show camaraderie with people who were paid to serve her? In the relatively short time they had been married, he had heard her claim to be a waitress, a domestic cleaner, a refuse collector, a parking attendant, a soldier, a paramedic, a prostitute and a homeless beggar, all of them while attempting to force monies on the oft-bewildered underling-in-imaginary-arms. Surely the only point in lying was to make one’s fellow humans feel worse, not better? Otherwise you might just as well tell the truth.
The heat hit them like a heavyweight with a habit. Everywhere people were squabbling, smooching, smoking cigarettes and something stronger over the stone backgammon and chess-boards etched into every spare stone surface. When Tel Aviv was being constructed, conjured up out of the thin air of mythology by hard-headed dreamers, air-conditioning was in its infancy in the Middle East, so it was the ultimate outdoor city, full of cooling walk-through fountains, and primary-coloured mini-gyms decorating the four miles of beachfront from the Old Port to Jaffa.
They stood and looked along the beach, taking in the IDF kids smoking dope, still in uniform, to the pair of young Orthodox men who stand fully clothed in the sea, entreating their modestly dressed, laughing wives to join them, to eventual uproarious splashing and shrieking.
‘I love the summer,’ Jackie sighed, ‘but the summer I love best is always the next one…’
He studied her sideways. It was a good line. But it was just about the only good line she had tonight. (Unless she scored, of course.) She was definitely getting to that sad stage where overweight people stop looking like merely sturdy versions of themselves and start looking like…someone else altogether. Soon, people she hadn’t seen for a while would stop recognising her; then, he would have to stop having sex with her. He’d dress it up in some metaphysical BS; ‘I’m sorry, habibi, but you just don’t look like Jackie - like MY WIFE - anymore…it feels strange, like making love to a stranger…’ On second thoughts, forget that; they’d both made love to enough strangers for that excuse to be a complete non-starter. O well, he’d cross that bitch when he came to it.