Grossman David - Her Body Knows

Because, he thought, she has protected her secret perfectly over the years, and also with great elegance and professionalism, qualities which she has certainly picked up from her contact with Paul, who is an absolute perfectionist. It was this, in fact, which had eventually failed her and exposed her to Shaul, because it stands to reason-this was how he had formulated things a long time ago-that over the course of their twenty-five years together, there must have been at least a few cases, two, three, four, which should have aroused his suspicion. After all, she is not living in a bubble: she goes to the mall, to the bank, the garage, the clinic, lectures on all kinds of things, neighborhood committee meetings; every so often she takes part in professional conferences, sometimes out of town; she has meetings with the day-care parents, some of them men, and she and Shaul have three or four couples of friends, and in fact there are men everywhere. But she, in her determination to protect what she truly cherishes, has never once tripped up, never given anything away in her tone of voice or in a blush, or a choked-back gasp. Never has Shaul come home to catch her quickly hanging up the phone or covering a piece of paper on her desk with her hand. Never has he found a note with a suspicious phone number in her purse, or in the pockets of her clothes, and even when that man Paul burst into their kitchen, Elisheva was remarkably calm and businesslike, he has to admit, and she treated the incident as if it were a purely professional matter. She was generally so innocent and transparent and clear throughout that Shaul began to wonder what was going on and what she was hiding so perfectly.

Of course, he could not really believe that the moment a woman stepped out of her normal life, out of her trajectory, her furrow, she began to scatter-involuntarily, of course, without knowing it- some kind of chemical or biological substance which unconsciously affected every man around her, so that each one of them, every male Elisheva passed on her way from home to that "alone" of hers, was somehow influenced by this radiation, by the involuntary evaporation and percolation of primary essences, some sort of ubermammal pheromones. But even so, was it really a stretch to assume that the first ones to be swept toward the stamen of this hidden radiation, during those four days of hers each year, would be those who come in daily contact with her? Even if that contact is minor and perfectly innocent? Shop clerks, supermarket employees, the bank teller, the gardener who worked for them until Shaul fired him not long ago, her hairdresser, the guy who delivers rolls in the morning. And without her or them knowing a thing, their pheromones were aroused to create a chain reaction whereby they both interpreted signals transmitted to them from their complementary genomes. And of course these messages are not only limited to the men who are close to her, because evolution, Shaul knows, cannot suffice with such a limited number of contacts. And so the pheromones spread with ever-widening ripples, and mate with the sensitive receptors of every man in their way, and these men too are swept after her without even understanding what is happening, without even knowing whom they are following. Because what attracts them, of course, is not one private Elisheva but the attractants she emits from the moment she is not within the circle of the man she lives with-or the two men, in her case. That is what they react to. That sexual gravitation, that horizontal gravity, all those men who experience a seemingly inexplicable, mysterious shockwave, the ones who are uprooted from their homes, their lives, or their dinners every time Elisheva leaves her life and goes off to be alone.

He sighed a deep "oh," and something sparked in Esti, the way the grin on the guy at the counter had suddenly changed after the second time she dialed. She smiled, because his eyes had followed her as she walked to the door and stayed on her through the window when she left.

And while she takes her afternoon nap, Shaul recounted, he sits on the porch drinking his coffee-that coffee, Esti thought, so solitary and bitter, while at her place they're all in the backyard enjoying Grandma Hava's tart-and tries to imagine what she talked about with Paul today, and hopes no one calls him during this hour, which is even more precious to him than the hour she spent with Paul, because now, when she is so close-he thought to himself-when her body is breathing beyond a thin wall, he feels he can know much more, that her substances are projected at him freely, and all he has to do is not resist them, allow himself to be invaded, be borderless. He can feel her and Paul and their day flowing and filling him up, slowly at first, like a thin trickle coming from far away, then becoming wild and frothy, and finally flooding him with hot torrents, in vibrant colors and scents and sounds. And I have these moments-Shaul laughed embarrassedly-which I would call, maybe, let's say, moments of inspiration. I have no illusions, of course-Esther mustn't think he has any such pretensions, because he doesn't, but sometimes, in these moments, he feels as if he could, for example, do something completely different with his life, be a sculptor, for instance, or draw or even write poetry-why not? He resisted telling her how his brain fills up and is compressed with warm blood and rich oxygen and dizziness, and his entire body sizzles with a cocktail of toxins and sweetness. But he could not stop himself from telling her that he himself barely exists at these moments, as do all the other elements of his being: the circumstances, the details, the facts that somehow stick to him day by day, even the worries for Tom, who can't find himself in Paris and is so lonely there that it breaks his heart, and the fight with the academic board that has been refusing to award him seniority for five years because of a dearth of publications, because of a complete lack of publications. I haven't even advanced one project all these years, did you know that? He sniggers. No, of course you didn't. I haven't had a single original idea. He tapped his head with his fingers. Ah! Empty. Completely emptied out. I don't know, sometimes I wonder how long they'll keep me on there. I've already heard talk of early retirement, and I'm not even fifty-five, you know? Esti listened in shock and wondered what would happen to them the next time they met with the whole family, how she would look at him, if he would evade her looks as usual, and how every word in the conversation would sound to him, and every laugh and sigh of Elisheva's, and if they would ever again enjoy another taste of this night's grace.

Shaul tensed his body as if trying to squeeze out a few more drops of the moments of elation during which everything sheds from him and he himself is everything and nothing, he is the stage and the play and the playwright and the director and the audience, and inside him a man and a woman rage in all their animalism and their beauty, she and he, grown adults, with developed emotions and ripe limbs, and the market is abuzz. Rows of stalls and tents and huts set up in minutes, in the blink of an eye. And it's all hers, it's all Elisheva. As if all the thousands of details that had ever made up her material life are spread out and itemized here in a wonderful kind of simultaneity. How did they get their hands on all this? When had they had time to plunder? Is it possible that the minute she "goes off to be alone," a temporary liquidator is appointed for everything that ties her to the mundane? Shocked and morose, he wanders through the crowds, turning down textile avenue, as the sign proclaims. A colorful whirlwind rises up around him, composed of towels and coverlets and handkerchiefs and scarves and tablecloths and napkins and tapestries and rugs and sheets, his and her sheets-