Grossman David - Her Body Knows

He thought of what had happened to them a few weeks ago when they were sleeping together in their way-meaning, they had woken up from sleep and found themselves entwined in each other. For some reason Shaul was unable to maintain his determined slumber, instead arousing himself with thoughts of her man. And he knew with certainty-from her movements and her rhythm and her tightly shut eyes and her guardedness that was let down, and her lips that rounded and her body that clung to him with desperate addiction and her fingers, which suddenly touched him in a different way, at once daring and tender, as if plucking a tune on a completely different scale, and her hands, which suddenly pushed his head down to lick the tip of her pleasure until she cried out-he knew so absolutely and without any doubt that she was, in her entirety, having sex not with him, that when he finally managed to blind and stupefy himself enough to come, he almost called out Paul's name with a frightened moan.

She's really girlish when she dances with him, he said. I didn't know her as a girl, only from pictures, but he … he peels away all her years when they dance. And he strips her of the lie too, he thought to himself. What he's really peeling away is the thousands of lies that suffocate her. Something cold passed over his face, desperation or revulsion at himself, at letting her torment herself like this for years without telling her how transparent she was to him, and that he knew all her moves and acts, and even derived bitter satisfaction from her tortured twists every time she traveled from one man to the other, each time she was scanned at his secret customs station. He shut his eyes tightly, as if in prayer, and Elisheva danced, erect, light, all smiles, and Paul saw it too and let go of her and stepped back and opened the blinds up without thinking. They never opened the blinds there, so that no one would look in on them, but now at once it was clear that this could not be hidden; it was a sin to hide such beauty.

The afternoon sun rushed in through the window that had always been forbidden. Elisheva danced, slowly lifting her arms over her head, and two fair, downy plumes nestled in her armpits. She turned her face up to bathe in the honeyed light, her eyes lightly shut, her fingers moving of their own accord, and her eyelashes and ankles and delicate knees and her hips. The sun in the window rebelled for a moment, sighed, and climbed back up a few degrees in the sky to see better, and clung to every limb of her body. All her limbs were curved, from the soles of her feet to her forehead, and the sun lingered like a handmaiden bathing her princess. Shaul was unable to move or breathe, and he consumed her with his gaze, and Paul did the same from his place, and between them, with herself, was Elisheva.

No, he's really something, he then declared with a bitter sigh. There's no doubt about that. Look, only an extraordinary man could justify what she has to go through to be with him. Feeling too exposed, he silently summoned up a distant flash of her to prick himself with quickly, from years ago when, as he says, they were still young and she was still beautiful. They had gone to see a movie about a grotesque hunchback hypnotist who mesmerized a woman from his audience. The woman got on stage, noble and restrained, but within minutes she was responding to all the hypnotist's disgusting advances, dancing and gyrating with him with a joyful smile on her face. Right in front of her husband and the entire audience, the hunchback kissed her on the mouth with his painted lips, a long and lustful kiss. Shaul looked away from the screen to glance sideways at Elisheva. As he looked at her face, at the very slight movement that passed through her lips, he knew with certainty that she too had a place in her soul where all her fairness and loyalty would be of no use to him, a place unruled by logic or even love, a kind of no-man's-land where any bastard could do as he wished. And he knew how easy it would be to penetrate that place, knew that there were people who could easily be there with one knock at the door-

Sometimes, he told Esti impetuously, when we're in bed, I think that if only I could take her body to the other room and question it, interrogate it, you know, get it to tell me everything it's learned there with him-Esti was shocked by the pain flowing from him in waves, like blood pulsating rhythmically-and forgive me for even letting you in on this, but you can already see where it leads me, because then I wonder how it can be possible that everything she hides-her life, her real life, I mean-everything is so close to me, behind perhaps one millimeter of skin, and yet I can't read it. It's all a total riddle to me.

But you do know everything, she whispered.

And their little customs, he went on as if he hadn't heard, their whole routine-that's the most difficult thing. Or words she only uses with him, he laughed: "ticklish," for example. What does that mean? Esti asked, momentarily lost in another place, in her own private dictionary. It's an English word. It means, let's say, a place that tickles if you touch it, and one day when we're in bed, she says to me about some spot on her waist that it's ticklish, and I tell you that's a word that was never even in our vocabulary-I never heard her say "ticklish"! Or once she described someone as being "seized with a frenzy." Can you hear her saying "seized with a frenzy"? Elisheva? But I suppose it's the same with me, he laughed. My lexicon has also changed, you must have noticed, because until all this happened to me I was half-mute, especially on these kinds of things. Really, even in my dreams I wasn't capable of being like this, like I am with you here.

He was quiet, and she was too, and he swallowed a hard lump and said, Yes, a whole dictionary has sprung up for me since then, and if Elisheva knew how I could speak, if she guessed I wasn't giving her any of it. He thought Esti asked why not, and even if she hadn't asked he replied immediately, firmly: Because words are his and her territory, that much is clear to me. But why is it so clear? Esti wondered. Oh, it's very clear, he answered. Maybe it's because they have so little time and opportunity for doing, so they talk. And therefore, he added, if she and he have words, I keep quiet. I-with all due respect-stay out of their domain! I don't step on his territory, get it? I don't get in their way and I don't invade their privacy. She pricked up her ears, perplexed by the dry argumentativeness that had suddenly taken hold of him, and even more so by his strange eagerness to be banished and exiled from that "territory" of theirs. She realized with surprise that he was practically forcing them to stand across from him with a flaming sword which turned every way, as if that were the deepest purpose of their love: to banish him from there.

A light fog covered the windows. They drove slowly, in a cloud. They did not see any other vehicles for a long while, and Esti thought maybe they should stop and wait for the fog to lift. But she too was being sucked in by the end, the end of the road, and she felt strips of heat on her skin as if she were jumping through his burning hoop again and again. Her whole body was different tonight. She suddenly felt heat in her shoulder, or her inner thigh, or felt she was being kissed fervently on her neck, or that a tongue was sliding over her ear-

More than anything, more than anything she had with him, she missed the language they had invented, the likes of which she had never had nor would again. The thoughts and ideas he had birthed in her, his golden touch, and the words that erupted from her and became sparks of light to him. They found they could multiply their pleasure, because every inch of the body had its own private name, every wrinkle and mole and freckle, every movement and touch and stroke and lick and tingle, and she could murmur in his ear how she wished he had a little tongue just above his penis, and hear him understanding and laughing softly in her ear. And she could call him, with a mouth full of yearning, My darling, my softness, my beloved, my endearment. Or leave him a note under his windshield wiper, with words that only he could understand: "This time tomorrow we'll be snuggling snugly." And together they could elevate a screw into lovemaking, a quickie to a flicker, climaxing to gushing. Look how beautiful you are, Esther, he would whisper to her in the middle of lovemaking, propping himself up on his arms over her and looking at her excitedly. Look. And she would smile and lift her head a little and look into his eyes to see.