Grossman David - Her Body Knows

"Rotem?" she asks gently, extracting me.

I rearrange my pages, and that motion organizes me, and suddenly I am washed over by a wave of happiness for it, for my little story, because it is a place, a home even, and I can go back to it from wherever I am. That is the reality-she herself said so when I asked before. "That's exactly the reality I want to hear." My reality. Firsthand.

She sits down beside him and touches the back of his neck, and feels him shudder. For several minutes she slowly runs her hands over his body, balancing the chakras and reading with her eyes closed. Then she pours some thick oil in her palm and rubs her hands together to warm the oil a little, so it won't chill him, and starts slowly rubbing the sides of his neck.

"What kind of lotion is that?"

"It's grape-seed oil, feel it." She lets him smell her palm. "It's not a very strong scent, is it? I didn't want the scent to be too strong in here, what with the candles, so it won't distract us."

She concentrates on his back, on the place where he hunches, pressing and kneading first, then switching to more gentle motions, squeezing his flesh between her fingers, gathering up knots of tough-

ness and anger and protest, and giving them back to him soft, appeased. Then with her knuckles, she prods the flesh on both sides of his spine, from top to bottom and back again, and for a long while she tries to soften the stubborn muscles around his neck. Only after making friends with his back does she dare to touch its scars, oiling them and rubbing in circles; she can't understand what his father used to beat him with, and she wonders what his dad knows about him and what he guesses.

His spine is like a thread, and she moves away from it to the outer areas of his body and rolls out his flesh to the sides with her palms, enjoying the way it springs back and swells and turns red and dark. She makes notes of the spots where the muscles are tense, and can't understand how he's capable of such flexibility with the mess he has in there, between his shoulder blades, where the scaffolding of his hunchback costume twists and turns like tendrils. As she works, his body becomes more awake and alert, unlike other people who sometimes drift off the moment she touches them and spend the rest of the massage floating in and out of sleep. Now she thinks she can sense his question about men and women throbbing along his body, and she hesitates a little over which one to start with. She grasps his shoulders and starts kneading hard, one shoulder after the other, pulling them up and back until it almost hurts, crushing and pushing with all her strength. Then she slowly fills them with broadness and power, and digs with her demanding fingers beneath his shoulder blades and muscles, and bends his arms back, and with her elbows she presses the lumps of tension and melts them into his flesh. She stops for a minute to wipe the sweat off her forehead with the back of her hand-she, who never perspires during a massage, and yet as soon as she started with him there was concentrated, sharp sweat. She smiles inside, because it occurs to her that men, if she's not powerful enough, don't feel they're getting their money's worth. A moment later she's unsure of whether that had been only a thought or whether she had said it out loud, because with his mouth flattened against the mattress he grunts at her to rub hard, but looking at the other side of his face, she can immediately see a thin smile, mocking, directed at them or at himself, she doesn't know. She fills with cheer and new energy, and blows on his neck: "Get ready, here it comes," and she showers his back and shoulders with a hail of rapid punches, sideways and lengthwise. His muscles tense at her, surprised, and deep from his throat comes a moan of desire and permission, and she feels he is responding to her strength, to the galloping intensity of her hands. He moans dimly beneath her, squirming and stretching and rounding, and wants her to hurt him, to dig into him, to bring something up out of him. She grows stronger and more vigorous by the minute, her stomach muscles rising and falling; she bares her teeth from the effort, and for several minutes she works like that, without a break, at times barely distinguishing his body from her own. Everything in her is overflowing, and she moans rhythmically, hoarse and sweaty, and with fingers that seemed to have suddenly become thicker and rougher, she carves out the biceps on his forearms and the long braids of muscle along his back, and shapes the tendons on his neck and arms, take, take-

Until she feels his body relaxing, as if he has disconnected from something, and for a minute or two he sprawls under her, breathing heavily, and she holds her hands up over him without touching, waiting to know his desire. He slowly calms down; he does not move, but he is unstill, because when she places her hands on his back he flows smoothly between her fingers, arching and streaming in waves beneath his skin, and her hands inquire, spreading over his skin ques-tioningly: What do you want now? What are you telling me? His body clings and twists into her hands and begins rubbing against them, and his skin is made of a thousand little mouths, trembling and leaping toward her with the desperate eagerness of fledglings who hear their mother's wings. "But what do you really want?" she murmurs. "Tell me, you're telling me all sorts of things, and I don't want to get it wrong."

He stops at once and buries his face in the mattress, and she suspects he already knows the answer but wants to hear it from her, that he needs her to guess his innermost yearnings without having to tell her. A familiar fear awakens inside her, the life-or-death fear, because who better than she knows how deep you can reach with a touch, all the way to the places that are completely helpless and that don't even have names or words to protect them, to insulate them or blur the roads that lead to them. Perhaps, she thinks suddenly, perhaps that is why Rotem has always resisted and recoiled and never allowed me all these years. She weakens briefly, looks at the boy lying there, and knows that he too is one of those people created by touch. She is afraid that if she makes the smallest mistake now, if she makes the wrong choice out of all her options, she will lose him, and this moment of grace will also be lost-and he may not have any more of them in the places he goes to.

She gathers up her body and closes her eyes, trying to think, but the thoughts scatter and her body lifts itself up and carries her to the window. She stands and stares at the red lights marking the shoreline, and breathes quietly for a few minutes, summoning all her ancient strengths to return, if only for one final time, to be with her here. When she turns around, she sees that he has taken his shorts off and now he is lying on his stomach, his buttocks like a beautiful, heart-shaped bright spot on his body. She stops and looks, despite herself, at the delicate way his ankles are crossed, at the silky quality flowing on his skin. Her gaze slides over him and she reads in him sign after sign of loneliness and longing, and his protest, so fragile, transparent, and brave. Then he slowly turns over and lies with his eyes closed, his body taut and his slim member folded in a plume of hair, and now he looks so young to her, so soft and helpless.

She sits by his head with her legs on either side of his shoulders, and his head is heavy and dense in her hands. She gently rubs his scalp and massages his ears, the fetus image folded inside them; she presses and rubs them until they become warm, and feels the heat flowing from them to his entire body. She softly caresses his face, his eyes, and knows that in his quiet, mysterious way, he has managed to seep into her, into the place from which her strengths emanate, and that he is taking from them boundlessly; she can feel them dwindling, but she cannot keep them from him, because someone that brave or desperate, reaching that far, is entitled to everything. She lays her hand on his high forehead, full of thoughts and secrets and innocence and schemes, and makes circles around the third eye between his eyes, the one that watches the universe, the eye that in my body, she thinks, is becoming covered with cataracts. But even so, I was capable of seeing you. His cheeks are smooth to her touch, and his lips, which she now touches for the first time, are two rolls of velvet. She has never touched lips so exposed in a man or a boy, and the thought passes through her that his mouth is already prepared, and she is happy, as if something has gone right for her, easily, and now the road is open. She bends over him and rubs her short hair against his, gently at first, then forcefully, wildly, growling like an animal rubbing its body against its pup, to infuse it with the essence of its knowledge. When she moves her face away from his, she finds in his eyes the look she saw after he came down from his first handstand. Her heart leaps, and she already knows what she must do, and she knows that this time she is not wrong.