Grossman David - Her Body Knows

"Is it hard for you?"

"No."

"Tell me when it is."

In response, he leans over a little more, lifting her higher. She allows herself to relax her body. Closes her eyes. She is amazed at his ability to find their shared balance, and at how wise his back is. She decides to give him another thirty seconds, for his self-respect, but then the room slowly fills with a silence disturbed only by their softly intertwining breaths. Without realizing it, she has become completely relaxed, unable to resist goodness when it comes. Her back cracks and opens up, her internal organs slowly release from the grasp of consciousness, flowing to the sides. His breaths fill her up. They are effortless. Her lower jaw drops. She sighs softly, thoughts slowly waft up inside her, disconnected. Soon it will be good, she knows, precious memories, beloved images. She relaxes her body, making space for the pleasure, but as usual, a moment before it becomes good, and much like anyone sailing away or taking off, she must pass the customs officer and pay the tax: the oven has been broken for six months and there's no money for repairs, the antique fridge she bought from some Russian widow is making her life a misery: if she doesn't defrost it for a week she has the entire Siberian wilderness in her kitchen. And where is she going to find the money to pay the repairmen, those sons-of-bitches, and what should she straighten first, Eden's teeth or Inbal's lazy eye-she could have at least bequeathed them good teeth and eyes. And the daily phone calls from the bank, and the long-reaching arms of the landlord, who is willing to make all sorts of arrangements with her, but that's not it, she explains to herself for the thousandth time with a kind of false as-sertiveness, as if she just needs to tell it to herself rationally and then she'll somehow be able to unravel the thicket. The cutbacks are the thing, and the way poverty is breaking her up into small change, that's the thing, and her paralyzing fear that perhaps she no longer even has a life of the soul. "Worry about making sure I have a pair of underwear without holes first," Rotem jabs at her, and Nili groans. Rotem again, Rotem from every direction. Stop, please, I don't have the strength to carry her on my back anymore. Rotem with her principles and her cold, twisted rationalism, finding the most painful way to take her revenge on me, with her bodily destruction, thickening and bloating herself-when did this happen? When did she slip through my fingers like this? But now she's hazy already, finally, the tax is paid, relatively quickly. After all-she breathes a sigh of relief-there are some advantages to being like one of those Weeble toys. The thoughts descend, soon they'll disappear beneath words, the morphine of pleasure starts spreading through her veins, her breath becomes light as a feather. It's been years since she's been able to relax like this, in this pose. Her body is still and floating and entirely open. Underneath, somewhere down there, his back is supporting her, but without demanding a thing of her. He's there. She's here. They touch only at one tiny point, two people in the universe touching each other for a moment in goodness. You can go a whole lifetime without knowing this kind of touch. Usually you must go through a whole life in order to be able to give such a touch. She asks herself where he has this knowledge from. What age he has come to her from. She feels as if she is barely putting any weight on him. For a moment she can imagine them spinning around and around in the air, and now she is the one carrying him with that same ease. Silence. Breaths. Floating. Her soul fills, drop by drop, with the rare nectar of trust.

"Who are you studying with?" she asks tightly when I turn the page.

"What?" I perk up. "What?"

"Rotem," she says wearily.

I gulp. Consider carefully, decide there's no point. "I took a few classes."

"Did you at least find a good teacher?"

"Yes." I wonder how long she's known, from which moment in the story. "Someone Melanie recommended. He's Japanese."

"The Japanese are a bit dry," she declares, and shuts her eyes. "You told him about me?"

"Yes. A little."

"And what did he say?"

"Nothing. He listened. He heard. He usually doesn't say much."

I can feel her scanning inside my head. My thoughts leap inside and I close the door behind them in a split second. Once, in a nature movie, I saw tiny little fish swarming into a sea anemone to escape a preying fish, and I recognized their movement of evasion and the motion of the anemone itself-a fleshy, complex mind, rushing to hide them. My Japanese yoga teacher had listened to what I told him and said, "The woman you spoke of doesn't work right. She relies on her intuition too much, and she's not at that stage yet." Then, at the end of the class, he came up to me again and said, "That woman, she works like someone who doesn't have a teacher. If she had a teacher he would reprimand her."

"I wanted so badly," she says finally.

"I only took a few classes, it's really not-"

"And are you going to continue?"

"I don't know." And I forced a laugh. "It's easier for me to write it than do it."

"No, no," she sighs, "you should keep doing it, it's good, it will be good for you."

She just lies there. Completely still. Because of her condition she has the strange ability to be present without being. In the space that now opens up between my chair and her bed, I remember the nights when Melanie taught me how to sleep together. I don't know why that comes into my mind. She seems to be resuscitating me from far away as soon as I start to weaken. I close my eyes and see myself fleeing from the bed to the mattress on the floor, and from there to the couch, and the rug, and Melanie following me sleepily from one place to the next. I shout that I can't fall asleep within the magnetic field of another body, and she mumbles, half asleep, "Come on, try a little longer." And so for a few bleary-eyed, sleepwalking weeks-and as if having no knowledge of it the next morning-she gave me the nocturnal portion of a withdrawal treatment from loneliness: one night we spent a whole hour together, the next night two hours, then a week of regression and crisis as I tried to adapt to the horrific idea of a shared blanket. Until suddenly, out of utter exhaustion, I discovered that our bodies had already reached an agreement-even mine, the illiterate one, must have caught on, because one night I woke up from a deep sleep and realized how beautifully we turned over together in bed, embraced. Now, when I smile, Nili looks at me, and I can't escape in time.

But as if operating her immediate healing mechanism, she remembers something. "There's something you should add."

"Where?"

"When you say what my face is like, how my jaw drops, you know, when I'm on his back."

"What should I add?"

"Write that when I'm like that, I mean she, then she thinks to herself that that's how she'll look when she dies."

"No, no."

"And then write: And she thinks of how everyone will see then that she really was a complete idiot. Write it. Now."

His ignorance amazes her. When she tells him she lived in India for three years, he asks if it's true that everyone there is black. When they talk about vegetarianism, he suddenly claims, with a strange fervor and a kind of vexation, that elephants are carnivores. "Elephants?" She doesn't know where to start refuting such nonsense, but he refuses to be convinced by all evidence she provides, slams his face closed, and locks himself up to her: that's what he's decided, and that's that. What are they teaching them at that boarding school? she wonders. Then something else happens, something trivial, that depresses her for the rest of the day.

While they're doing breathing exercises, sitting across from one another, she presses three fingers below his navel, in the body's furnace, seemingly searching for something. She doesn't find it, and hes-