The Dead Man

The Dead Man (Chapter 1) - Overture

The first time this happened, Eve was taken aback by how nice she sounded. Jake's wife had a sweet voice. She was a therapist, Jake had told her once. Not a music therapist, like Eve, or any other real type of therapist — Fran hadn't studied any mental health profession in university; she just did some sort of New Age bodywork. But still, on the phone, Eve could hear some of that in her voice: the therapeutic tone, the desire to proffer help. In this first "conversation" with Fran (which came after Eve had already called and hung up on Jake several times), she could tell that he and Fran had discussed these calls, because Fran reacted now without surprise. She seemed to have decided that the silence on the other end of the line wasn't coming from anybody dangerous. Just a shy first-time client (or maybe a troubled old one) who had dialled her number but then couldn't screw up the courage to ask for an appointment.

"Hello?" said Fran in a normal voice on that first phone call. Then, after Eve said nothing, Fran said "Hello?" again, but this time encouragingly, with a sort of professional kindness. When Eve still didn't answer, Fran asked in a warm, empathic way, "Is there something I can do for you?"

Yes, thought Eve: You can let me be friends with your husband. (Friends — just friends. I would settle now even just for that.) And Fran sounded so nice that Eve, always drawn to, and eager for, kindness and human warmth (and in this case to the therapist-empathy that dripped like milk-and-honey from Fran's voice), nearly said this out loud. But then she remembered that as sweet as Fran sounded on the phone, she was the one who had told Jake that he and Eve couldn't stay friends. Friends — just regular friends — that's all Eve was asking for by then. But even this regular non-physical friendship with Jake meant the world to her. She would never have allowed herself to become intimately involved with him if he hadn't promised her, repeatedly and unequivocally, that for sure — a hundred percent for sure — they would remain friends afterwards, no matter what happened. Staying friends meant to her that she hadn't been cheap. That it hadn't been cheap. That apart from the sex, there had been a real relationship between them. Which there had.

But Fran would not agree. She would not allow Eve and Jake to be even the most casual, innocuous of friends. They couldn't even meet in a public place for a coffee (in Aroma or Caffit), surrounded by dozens of other people (mostly English-speakers like them, and at least a few of whom knew either Jake or Eve) once or twice a year when she came to Israel. So now Eve didn't let herself fall for the sweetness in Fran's voice. Fran was her sworn, life-long enemy.

Eve wouldn't say a word to her, not a single word. She just hung up the phone that day. After that, in the subsequent calls, Fran started sounding afraid.

Then about a year ago, making these phone calls stopped being fun. They even started becoming onerous: a chore, a responsibility, something Eve had to cross off her list of things to do while in Israel. She had no choice but to call Jake at home because he worked primarily at home and was rarely at the institute he'd founded. And she had to call the family phone number because Jake didn't believe in cellphones. And she had to call from a street pay phone - otherwise he or Fran could trace the call to her cellphone or her hotel. And it had to be early in the morning before Fran woke up so that she'd get Jake on the phone, not his wife. And it began feeling like a huge pain, having to wake up early on a holiday, in order to rush to the nearest pay phone a block and a half away before seven a.m.

But even more than all that, it started to get creepy. Creepy hearing Jake's rage and Fran's fear. Instead of feeling powerful and in control, Eve began feeling powerless and out of control. She wasn't doing this anymore out of her own free will; it had turned into an obsession. A compulsion. An obsessive-compulsive disorder. By this time a year ago, the third week in December, she couldn't walk past any pay phone in Israel without wanting — without needing — to stop and call Jake. This offended her self-respect. What was she — a slave to this thing? Plus one day she told an Israeli friend she had known for many years about these phone calls — told her about them, laughing, like it was a joke she was playing on Jake, just something slightly bizarre. But instead of laughing along with her, her friend blanched and looked at her strangely.