Grossman David - Her Body Knows

She shifted in her seat. Massaged her aching back against the seat. It was hard for her now, almost unbearable to go back there with him.

I think about it a lot, he said. I sometimes wonder when exactly they decided on it. Maybe it was the day Tom graduated from high school. That evening we were at the graduation with all the other students and their parents, and it was important to Elisheva to celebrate something meaningful with Paul too, at lunchtime. She listened. His voice, as usual, became stronger by the minute and filled with the blood of the story. Or did it happen after her mother died? Maybe she realized life was short and decided she wanted to finally take a real, uncompromising step.

His lips thickened as he pondered again, for the thousandth time, how and at what moment in life a person makes such a fateful decision. How one manages to hide from one's partner the difficulty of the decision making, the sighs of unease, the expansion of the heart when one suddenly feels it's the right thing to do and that one is in a place where laws and norms do not reign. Sometimes I think, he added, that perhaps I noticed a new expression on her face that day, the day she made the decision, but I didn't realize what it was. Or I try to remember a period of time, let's say a few days or a week, when she was unusually elated-a burst of happiness or something wild, irrational, maybe even a sense of vengeful glee toward me, over her finally being completely free of me, on a symbolic level, of course.

Then they deliberated over whether or not they should invite any friends, he went on, and even though they both knew right away that they didn't want any strangers at the ceremony-and for them, he snickered, a "stranger" is any human being at all-they still couldn't overcome the pleasure of amusing themselves with the thought that their close friends would be with them, you see, that for once they would be looked at lovingly from the outside too.

She nodded, eyes glazed over, trapped again and again in the burgeoning conversation that spread out for her within those two "hel-los," in the silence, in the sigh. She thought: How can he still pull me out of my life like a hair from a ball of dough? Sighing, almost begging him to let her go, to release-

And just think, Shaul said from somewhere far away, how many of their days-I mean, their few hours-they wasted on planning the wedding. Although it's certainly possible that they didn't see it as a waste. He shrugged. Maybe dealing with it actually made them feel they were more, I don't know, real? Tangible? They definitely made lists. Or rather, Elisheva did. You know how fond she is of lists. He smiled, and Esti smiled dully with him, remembering the little yellow notes that always floated around Elisheva. And they wrote down for themselves all the pros and cons, whom to invite and whom not to, whom they could trust and who might blab, and tried to guess each person's reaction to the invitation, and I have to ask you-

She didn't even have to stop and think: Yes, I would have come.

He contemplated a little. She could tell he liked her answer. I don't blame you, he said.

Look, he sighed, this whole thing isn't easy for me. Sometimes I'm really enraged inside. I think, for example, of the wanderings my job has imposed on both of them. Over the past ten years we've been on two sabbaticals, one in Washington and one in Boston, and each time the sabbatical came up she didn't even try to protest, didn't look for excuses to get out of it, but just accepted it simply and even managed to seem happy. I remember how it amazed me then: she said it wouldn't be a bad thing for us to breathe some fresh air, for both of us to refresh ourselves a little together. She was really excited about it, even though I knew that such a long trip, for them, meant a huge, complicated, and completely unnecessary organizational effort. And think about him, about her Paul, who had to uproot himself from here and become an immigrant again in a strange country. He had to rent an apartment to be close to us, somewhere she could reach within her almost-hour of swimming, which she didn't give up anywhere, in any country on any day-his voice trembled-because she couldn't give it up, because without it she probably would die. It's as simple as that. Esti looked at him and for a moment he seemed even more exposed, almost naked in his clothes. And you have to understand, it's not easy for me to think that the second I announced the move she agreed immediately, and took it upon herself to get this whole trip off the ground, all the uprooting. Maybe she felt as if that way she was cleansing her sins somehow, I don't know. But sometimes the thought of her huge efforts, theirs, around those two trips, illuminates me in a rather unpleasant light, he said, as if they know something about me that I prefer not to know, not to think of. What? she asked feebly. What do you mean? As if I'm a person-he hesitated, his bottom lip trembling-whose grasp on life is tenuous, pathetic, like that of someone with a chronic illness, terminal even, or like one of those children who have to be kept in a sterile bubble their whole life.

Hypnotized, she hovers in the space of his sealed pod, a human flake carried this way and that on the current of a strong breeze. Thoughts pass through her, chills of consciousness, alien headlines,

ridiculing, but she doesn't want them. Maybe later. Tomorrow. And she knows: as early as dawn. And she hopes she won't betray what she felt then either. And if she does, she hopes she at least knows that she is betraying. And that she remembers how excited she is now by this power of his to insist on keeping the ember that burns inside him alive, as if there is no one with him and he has no shame, no truth or lies, nothing forbidden or ugly. It excites her to think that he has, quite simply, shown her the cogwheels and levers and pistons of the abstract mechanism that generates-in his soul and in hers too-the dreams and nightmares and hallucinations and terrors and yearnings. They are all exposed to her, gaping generously in a way no one has ever given her before, and it is good for her there, she knows, it is so warm. She reaches back and feels around and finds his hand, envelops it with her fingers, squeezes, sending him strength, drawing it from him.

But they did have flowers, he laughs exaggeratedly, excited by her touch and not pulling his hand back. If there's one thing I know for sure, it's that Elisheva wanted the house to be full of flowers. Because when she's with him, in their home, flowers always give her a sense of space and freedom. You should see how she sniffs the bouquet she buys for Shabbat from the Yemenite guy by the post office-such a smiler, that one, with big lips, almost purple-and how she arranges the flowers in a vase, her seriousness, and how much time she spends on them, and the way suddenly, listen, as if she can't take it anymore, she leans over swiftly and puts her face in and inhales them as hard as she can-

He speaks quickly, grasping her hand as if trying to push away what will happen soon, what he will see in a few minutes. How did she manage not only, he says, to take off the veil she must have worn, not only the dress she bought for the ceremony and probably left in his closet among the other dresses, but how did she hide everything else? That's what I don't get: the excitement, the trembling knees when he lifted her veil to kiss her, the ring he bought her-after all, he put a ring on her finger, and then he had to take it off as soon as the ceremony was over, and that's the ring he puts on her finger every time she shows up at his door, and that way, every day they have a new little wedding ceremony. Maybe she even forgot to take the ring off that day, he thinks suddenly, and only when she left the apartment and stood at the steps to blow him one last kiss, only then did he notice it and, alarmed, whisper to her to return, and she didn't understand what for, but went up happily for another kiss, and he pulled the ring off and kissed her bare finger. Shaul chokes, and Esti sees his eyes glaze over in the mirror and his lips pucker for an imagined kiss, and her heart tears with compassion. That is the essence of his life, she thinks. These thoughts and fancies, they are more alive in him than anything else, they may even be more-something jolts in her-than what he has with Elisheva herself.