To Stray Or To Stay?

Which path is the correct one - if either? Getty Images.

Her name was Rosie and when I think about her now it is impossible not to enter the dreamscape of the life I might have lived.

We were destined to meet only once, in that West Jerusalem bar in 1987. She was a dark-eyed Israeli beauty. I was an Australian correspondent, still young enough not to understand how life is sometimes just a series of choices.

“Shalom,” she said, as she sat down at the bar.

“Shalom,” I replied, having almost exhausted my knowledge of Hebrew.

We did the preliminaries … in English. Where are you from? How long have you been here? What do you do? So what do you think of Israel and what’s your view of the conflict?

“Well, that’s a big subject,” I said.

“Yes, that’s true,” she said laughing and extending her hand.

Rosie stayed with me that night, but we stopped short of going too far; probably a good thing given how complicated my life was about to become.

Merran, my Australian girlfriend, had only just returned to Sydney after spending two weeks with me in Israel, wandering the bazaars of Jerusalem’s Old City, visiting the Wailing Wall, floating on the Dead Sea, lunching by the shores of the Galilee.

We’d had a glorious time together, but now she was home and I was here and we’d agreed that while in separate countries we would, to quote Lebanese poet Kahlil Gibran, “let the wind flow freely between the cyprus and the oak”.

A few nights after meeting Rosie the wind suddenly picked up.

“Hi, darling,” Merran said when I answered the phone. “You wouldn’t believe what’s happened.

There’s no job for me.”

“What do you mean there’s no job?”

“He sacked me.”

“He can’t sack you.”

“Well, he did. Can I come back to Israel?”

“That’s terrible. Shit. I can’t believe it.”

“Yes … Can I come back?”

“Look give me a minute – yes, I think so – I’m not sure. Oh, that’s terrible. Let me call you back.”

I hardly knew Rosie. She was a figment really. But I liked what I knew and I wanted more.
“What do you mean you’re not sure?” Merran asked.

Merran and I had known each other since we were 14, and even though there’d been years between meetings, it was like we’d lived inside each other’s skins forever. We loved the same books, music, people, politics and food. We both came from middle-class Sydney homes. We had a lot going for us.

But then there was Rosie – fresh and desirous and inviting me to her place for dinner next Tuesday.

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This was my fork in the road. In my wilder fantasies the right fork had me working as a Middle Eastern correspondent, married to an Israeli woman (Rosie?), having two children, making our homes in this wounded, ancient, blood-soaked land.

The left fork had me heading back towards the bays and beaches of Sydney, towards family and friends and all the comfortable certitudes of a life one could easily take for granted. My father was in Jerusalem at the time and the next morning I visited him in his hotel overlooking the great walls and turrets of King David’s city.

“What would you do?” I asked.

A minute passed before he offered this life-altering thought: “It seems to me you’ve never loved anyone as much as you love Merran; nor have you been loved by anyone as much as she loves you. This is a huge blow to her, losing her job. She’s asking to come back and I don’t see how you can say no to her unless you want to throw everything away.”

That night I chose the left fork. “Darling, I’m sorry I hesitated,” I told Merran on the phone. “When can you get here?”

And then the next day to Rosie: “Look, about Tuesday night … I’d love to but my girlfriend is arriving from Australia.”

“Oh, that’s too bad,” she replied. “Perhaps we won’t see each other again, no?

“I’m not sure.”

“So have a good life, yes?”

“Yes. You, too.”

Merran and I were married six months later in in Sydney. As she glided down the aisle towards me, i knew deep in my bones that i’d made the best decision of my life, even though i couldn’t foresee the events that would one day tear us apart.

Our marriage gave us two precious daughters and two mostly joyous decades – until our separation four years ago and divorce last year. No-one tells you (or do they?) how even when the left fork was the right fork to have taken, both are paved with perilous uncertainty.

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