Grossman David - Her Body Knows

And now it's a little easier for him. He doesn't know how it happened, but the path seems to have been paved, and all he has to do now is follow it over and over again until it is conquered, and for an instant he even contemplates the possibility that the pleasure of keeping a secret and the pleasure of revealing it are perhaps not so distant from each other. He explains that Elisheva, in her special circumstances, must be very efficient and businesslike because of those transitions. After all, she didn't use to be like that, he smiles forlornly, and Esti nods and sees the dreamy Elisheva of the past, frightened by large department stores, bungling tip calculations in restaurants, standing with a little street map, her brow furrowed, deliberating over which is her right hand; she is filled with longing for Elisheva again, for the days when everyone was still together. Even Shaul had been with them back then, in his own way, of course, kicking out now and then, but at least he was within kicking distance. As he continues talking, she recalls a distant sunny afternoon in her garden, when Tom was little and Shira and Eran were still babies. She sees Shaul and Micah playing ball with them, then forgetting about the little ones and horsing around with each other-Shaul happy as he dribbles the ball with a skill that surprises her and deceives Micah, Elisheva sprawling in a deck chair, full and soft and golden, smiling at him. She had huge sunglasses back then, Esti remembers, like Sophia Loren; she had asked her to go and buy them with her. When she smiles at Shaul, he seems to lose his balance for a second, then raises his arms and links his hands over his head in victory. He snatches up Tom and lifts him onto his shoulders and charges around the lawn with him. His parents and Micah watch Shaul and the boy with a longing that Esti did not understand at the time, and still cannot decipher in all its subtleties. They seemed to be praying for Tom to serve as a kind of appeals court, she now thinks, where they would win Shaul back, or perhaps gain him for the first time.

As if he had been listening to every word that passed through her mind, Shaul blurts out that everything has changed so much, and that you don't get used to something like this; that every time he thinks about it, it destroys him to comprehend that his wife-and here he stops and withdraws, my wife, he thinks, amazed, as if pronouncing the words for the first time, my wife, and for a moment he sees the words hover above him with his very own eyes, these words that enter the world gnawed, he feels, always surrounded by a ring of tooth marks- Where was I? he mutters, and Esti reminds him, and he whispers that he can never grasp that Elisheva has been maintaining an entire life with another man for at least ten years, fifty-odd minutes a day. These are fleeting moments, to be sure, but when I think about some of the couples I know, he says, there seem to be some who don't even have that daily time together, certainly not with a focus that is so. what's the word, so concentrated, and all the more so because Elisheva-and here a little smile lights up his face, making it almost beautiful for a moment-can be very intense with all her excitement and storminess and her moods and her enthusiasm. But here Esti disagrees, because her Elisheva was always remarkably tranquil, and that was also why she had so loved to be with her. No, no, he protests, as if all her thoughts are transparent to him,

you can't imagine how stormy she can be, really pressurized, or at least she used to be when we were first together, before she started sharing her energies with another person. And when I think of it like that, he sighs, I can certainly see-I can imagine, I mean-how she in fact maintains her life with him. Esti, with limp and bloodless lips, asks how, and Shaul says dryly, as if slicing out thin and very crisp words, Listen, it's a life that has not even one moment of waste or boredom, or of fatigue, you know, because of tiredness or indifference, or just getting sick of each other. With them it's the opposite, he declares. Every moment of theirs is electrically charged and full of interest and passion. It's an intense life, he determines, and after a minute, as if a confession has been wrested from him, he adds, A full life.

Wait a minute, she said later, blinking. What did you say before?

What did I say?

You said, she carefully reconstructed, that you can imagine.

Imagine what?

Her life with him.

He was quiet.

Because all this time I thought that you and she. that you-

She doesn't know that I know, he said. I thought you understood that. He started gnawing at his upper lip and did not look at her.

Esti felt the blood pulsing quickly in her knuckles as they grasped the wheel. The thought was so foreign that her tongue and lips moved with it in a slow chewing motion.

But how?

He nodded, defeated.

I don't understand. Her voice faded, lost. You just sit at home-

He wiped his face with both hands. His burning forehead, his temples.

Why? she practically yelled.

Why? He spoke into himself, sealed and dark. Why indeed?

Like a man shouting into a well, she thought.

It's been at least ten years that this thing of theirs has been going on, he said after a few moments. Don't you think I know her well enough?

And you never-

Never.

But how can you not? she whispered again, suddenly disbelieving him, recoiling, disgusted by him, and immediately also struck by a lightning bolt of loathsome pictures, soap operas and hidden cameras and people being paid to spy and rob other people of their intimacy and spoil their moments of sweetness. Secrets defiled in the light. She was horrified to think of innocent Elisheva, whose purse might contain a bug-for all she knew he had bugged every room in that apartment too, certainly the bedroom. Her stomach turned. Perhaps he just sits and watches her from the moment she leaves the house-

I've never followed her even once all these years, he said quietly, then almost whispered, But, Esther, please, she cannot know that I know.

Her pulse beat in her neck with crazed speed and her eyes became covered with a film. Only now, in rhythmic waves, was she struck by her stupidity, her blindness, her estberonautiness , and, above all, her longing, the insult of the power of her longing, and she knew very well that it was these shortcomings that had made her so eager to interweave in his story the threads of her secret dreams of candor and of painful, purifying honesty; of a generous togetherness in which everything was possible. For a moment, with all that had been spun and stabbed and defiled within her, her face took on the expression of a frightened, abandoned girl who lunges out to bite, who lives unimaginably close to the skin's surface, ready to be drawn out like a final plan of retreat.

His voice was tired, crushed. You know, I could drive after her when she says she's going to the pool, couldn't I? Any normal person in my situation would do it, wouldn't they? Maybe even you would.

Yes, she thought quickly. No, of course I wouldn't. Maybe just once, to see a different Micah-

Just follow her there and confront her, do it and be done with all this mess. And he laughed dully. You know, when Tom was injured on a school trip in the eleventh grade and they called me to the hospital, I didn't even phone the swimming pool for them to page her. I didn't want to embarrass her in any way, Esther.

And when he said it that way, simply, but also proudly, she saw inside him, and in a blinding flash, his insides were lit up for her like a drawing in an old nature book, a cross section of the soul, the secret soul, and for a moment she pulled back from this forbidden sight. Then she looked again, hypnotized, and knew he was giving her something that had no name, with a generosity that was also horrifying. She could see the negative image of her own reflection somewhere on the edge of his pupil, she had a place there, and with the instinct of a seed she held on and struck roots; only then, finally, did she extricate herself from the dullness that had enveloped her all evening and truly grasp the gift he was offering, his one-time invitation, and with both hands outstretched, she caught it quickly and resourcefully, with the same agility with which she catches the yolk of a broken egg. Then she sat and drove in a kind of hovering state, almost without touching the wheel, and wondered how an expanse could be made up of so many twisted damp crevices, because she suddenly felt an expanse, and drunkenness, and was amazed at how from misery and distortedness such as his, he had managed to lead her astray into this open space, a tortured and miserable place, but also uninhibited and possessed of a passion to destruct-a healthy passion to destruct, whose sharp, burning pleasure she had long ago forgotten. She thought he was mad, Shaul, and unbearable, and indefatigable, and that's what she told herself the next morning-that she had suddenly found one place in him where, in defiance of all logic, he was free.