True Lisa stories (part 2 of 4)

I’d been stopping by her office every day. At first I’d invented excuses for the visits, but soon enough the visits themselves became the excuse. I was there to put a smile on her face. On one of those days she greeted me by saying “I dreamt about you.”
“Oh, really?” I said, and took a piece of candy from the little basket she had on her counter. “So how was I?”
“Well, actually, in the dream I was asking you how I was.”
I smiled, and my lungs popped into my throat. “Oh, really? Cool.”
“Yeah, we were on another trip with our unit, but this time you and I parked this red car away from everybody else. And the car was surrounded by ropes, here, let me show you.” She slowly peeled a post-it note and taped in onto the counter. She drew a crude car from a bird’s-eye view and a pole on each corner with four ropes strung between them tightly, closing the car off like a crime scene. I saw all that in a rectangle within a rectangle. “See, it kind of reminded me of a stable or something.” She went on. “And there was also a horse there. And I asked you how I was, if I’d been alright. I mean, we’d just had sex, yeah?”
I stared into her eyes as she said “had sex”, and my legs froze. I couldn’t have left even if I’d wanted to.
“And you were kind of apathetic, you said ‘yeah, you were alright’ in that voice,” She’d mimicked my tone from her dream. “And I asked you how you preferred it, me on top, me on the bottom, whatever…” She laughed. “It took me so long to get you to actually say I’d been alright.”
She looked at me, expecting me to say something.
I said “That’s not a very realistic dream.” She waited for more. “I mean, I’m not that kind of guy in real life.”
“What do you mean ‘that kind of guy’? A guy who has sex?” She asked.
Of course I hadn’t meant that at all, I’d meant a guy who could be apathetic to a woman who’d just slept with him and was now asking him what he preferred, I was the kind of guy who would tell her she was wonderful if I had the chance and the reason, but I hadn’t and she’d asked that question and it seemed the easiest thing to do at that moment was to answer. “Yeah, exactly, the kind of guy who has sex. I’m not the kind of guy who has sex.”
“Are you a virgin?” She asked with trepidation.
I nodded. I couldn’t believe this was happening, that I was confirming those words within my world of military role play and confiding in Lisa of all people.
“And hold on, you’ve never had a girlfriend?” She asked.
“Nope. I’ve barely even been friends with a girl.”
“You’re going to be twenty years old!” She cried.
“Hey, don’t kill me, ok?” I chuckled nervously.
“But why?” She asked in surprising desperation.
“I don’t know. I’m bad with women.”
“How about a change?” She said. “It’s ok, I like virgins.”
“You like virgins.”
At that moment a couple of soldiers entered her office to exchange their bus tokens, and I practically ran away with barely a smile and a wave of my hand.

I called the one person I knew would answer, my friend Gil, my only friend who had not been drafted to the army. He was sitting at a restaurant on his lunch break when I called, I could hear the chatter and the clinking of forks and knives against plates in the background. I retold Lisa’s dream, careful not to omit any detail, and he said “Are you serious?! A red car? A red car, man?! In dreams red means sex, man!”
“Yeah, I’m pretty sure that the part about us having sex means sex too.” I said.
“I’m not so sure about that. Dreams are strange, they don’t always mean what you think they mean. But man, a red car. That means sex.”
“I’m depressed.” I said.
“You’re depressed ‘cause you’re afraid. You’ve got to strive for it. Strive to fuck.” He made me smile. I was happy I’d called him. He took another bite and said “But listen, you gotta remember that it might be nothing. Girls like to flirt, they like to tease, they like to talk. It inflates their egos. So don’t be sure of anything.”

She had dreamt of the two of us having sex, and she had been worried about her pleasing me. We’d been in a red car, and around us there had been horses. On some level, I thought, whether she knew it or not, whether she’d wanted to or not, Lisa was attracted to me. I paced around my room impatiently, and decided to go to sleep. Surely I would dream about her. It was much too early for sleep but I climbed into bed anyway and waited with open eyes. I composed a witty and erotic dialogue for the two of us, Lisa and I. She’d be the teacher and I’d be the student.

For a while there was nothing, and then my phone rang. I didn’t catch the name at first, so the voice repeated itself. I thought it was a wrong number, but no, they were definitely looking for me. It was a young man, a researcher for one of the nation wide Israeli radio stations. He’d gotten my name and number from the Screenwriting School of Tel Aviv, where I had recently started studying. I was the youngest student to ever study there, and a soldier at that. He wanted to know if I’d be willing to be interviewed live over the phone on the radio within the hour. I mumbled uncertainties. He caught on to my apprehension and asked me to stay on the line. A moment later he was replaced by a woman’s voice dipped in honey who said “Come on, what’s the big deal? It’ll be a phone conversation just like the one you and I are having now.”
“This good, huh?” I said bitterly, and she laughed and laughed, just like Lisa.
I agreed.

My interview was set for forty minutes into the future. I was out of bed once again, pacing around my room. I felt like an ice cube slowly melting on a counter in anticipation. Panic fumes blackened the insides of my lungs. Moments ago I had been pleasurably losing myself in a scripted conversation with Lisa and now I was anxiously writing my own lines for the stage I was about to step onto. I turned on my radio.

The show started. The first two interviewees spoke in rich, secure voices. Between interviews the station played bad music, and it was over one of these poor songs that my phone rang. I was instructed to count out loud to five. I was afraid I’d lost my voice in the pacing.

Then she was there. Her voice was the strongest of them all, and mine was squeaky and weak in comparison. She mispronounced my last name multiple times but I was helpless, unable to correct her. I would be named whatever she’d name me. She asked me simple questions and I choked my way through them. A couple of times I apologized and said, “I don’t have the words”. She laughed and said “It’s alright!”, but I could almost see her reprimanding someone after the show. I wished for it to be over, and hoped I wouldn’t vomit on my phone beforehand.

The weekend came. Tal ate a sloppy falafel in front of me and I had no appetite. He heard the stories of my week, Lisa’s dream and the radio interview, and asked “Why’d you do that? The girl comes to you with a dream where she’s asking you how she was, she’s the insecure one, you’ve got the upper hand and you go and lose it.”
“Man, I kind of hoped you’d calm me down.”
“I’m not good at that kind of shit, calming people down.”
“Yeah, well… I’m never going to let anybody interview me ever again.”
“Who wants to interview you?”
“I don’t know. No one.”
“So what are you worried about?”
“Nothing.”