Grossman David: Her Body Knows

How does she do it? he wonders. Over and over again, the meticulous rituals she must perform and the nervous scurrying through rooms before leaving, slamming closet doors, opening and closing drawers. An impenetrable expression grips her lovely face during those moments-God forbid she should forget a comb or a book or a bottle of shampoo, or everything might collapse. He sits at his empty desk with his head in his hands as she tosses him a quick goodbye from the door, and his heart sinks: she didn't even come near him to take her leave. Something special is going to happen there today, and she's already rushing out into the street, looking down so as not to make eye contact with anyone and get entangled in a needless conversation. How does she keep it up? Where does she find the strength to go through with it every day?

Then, after this momentary lapse of watchfulness, he shuts his eyes and hurries to accompany her as she gets into her car, a little green Polo. He had bought it for her as a surprise. She was horrified by the color and the extravagance, but he wanted her to have her own car. So you can come and go as you wish, he had said. So we won't keep fighting over the car. And he wanted her to have a very green car. He pictured it as a shiny microchip inserted into her veins so a camera could monitor her. Slowly he lowers his head against the back of the chair, and she drives away. Her face is strained and held too close to the windshield. It will take her about eight or nine minutes to get there. Allow for any unforeseen delays (traffic, a broken stoplight, the man waiting for her there at the apartment mislaying the keys and taking a while to open the door), and already another four or five precious minutes are lost. "Elisheva," he slowly says out loud, enunciating each syllable.

Then he says it again, for that man.

The man who does not want to have to waste any time later undressing-time is short-so that while she navigates the car through the braids of tiny streets connecting this house to that one, he already begins to undress in the bedroom, or perhaps by the door, taking off his baggy brown corduroys and large faded shirt. It used to be orange or brown, or even pink-he was certainly capable of wearing a pink shirt, what did he care what people thought? That's what's great about him, Shaul thinks: that he doesn't care about anything, unconcerned by what people might think or say. That is his strength, his healthy internal perfection; that is what she must be attracted to.

She drives to him, charges toward him, her eyes pinned on the road, her mouth pulled taut. Soon that mouth will be kissed and it will soften and swell and burn. Lips will slide over it, first only flitting, barely touching, then a tongue will come and trace the outline of her lips over and over and she will try not to smile as he grumbles, Don't move while I'm drawing. She will let out a moan of consent; then his lips will rest on hers with all of their rough, masculine force, they will swallow them, wallow in them, and leave them for a moment. A warm breath will pass over them, then they will slowly be sucked with the solemnity of truly great desire, tongues will intertwine with each other like creatures with a life of their own, and she will open her eyes briefly with a weak sigh, her eyeballs will roll up a little, fade, disappear. Half-closed eyelids will reveal an empty, frightening whiteness.

She is a large woman, Elisheva, her generosity extending to her body too. She's even a little too large for such a small car, and perhaps this was why she had been angry that he'd bought her the Polo, of all things. This also may have been precisely the reason he had chosen it-this thought has only just occurred to him-for the sense of her practically bursting through its shell on her way there, erupting toward the waiting man as she tries to keep her mind on the road, delighting in her guess that he and she are thinking the same exact thoughts. That way we gain another few minutes together, she once told him.

She charges ahead, the green car dances through the network of arteries that spreads from here all the way to him, and when Shaul emerges from the wave of pain, she's already there with him. He can see them dimly, a large wide blur of warmth, solid arms, and her brisk movements as she holds on to his shoulder with one hand and bends over to pull off her shoes without unbuckling them. Her fingers stiff with longing, she touches his naked body; his clothes are already at his feet, and hers fall on top of them, and Shaul shuts his eyes and absorbs the blow embodied in this intermingling of fabric, and it hurts so much that he has to look away from the man's clothes, because, for a moment, even the man himself is less painful than the clothes shed on top of one another. This man who had undressed early to save a few more precious seconds, had waited for her anxiously as he walked around the house naked and burning with excitement, thrilling himself with thoughts of the large, beautiful, decisive woman who was pressing on toward him in the green, sexy car-that was how the grinning, dark-skinned salesman had tried to sell it to Shaul; that word had left Shaul no choice but to buy it. The naked man had rushed around the tiny apartment, even though he is a fairly slow man by nature, and Shaul can actually see every single one of his motions, the way he walks and his slightly plodding, authoritative speech. But now his excitement builds because she is already hurrying up the steps; she is really coming now and he opens the door and carefully selects the position in which he will appear to her, because his nudity is, to put it delicately, perhaps not likely to awaken any joy in Elisheva, particularly when he stands, especially in daylight, which certainly does not flatter the many moles that dot his stomach and chest or his large, masterful male breasts and ample gray hair. As she runs up the stairs today, he opens the door just a crack and hurries to the bed in a carefully darkened room, where he lies down in a flattering pose on his stomach, one knee slightly bent, as if he had dozed off into a pleasant snooze as soon as he had opened the door for her, sleeping with the carelessness of a thoroughly healthy man who has no problems with digestion or conscience, so that the first thing she sees when she enters is his back, which looks strong-and probably is strong-then his buttocks and his legs, which look almost youthful in this position. She stands there for a moment, watching, smiling to herself, then she walks to the bed and with calculated gentleness runs one finger along his back, from his neck to his buttocks, then leans over and runs her tongue slowly, reservedly, over his neck from side to side, just the tip of her tongue, just a hint of her mouth's moisture, and he shudders with a restrained moan into the pillow as if he were about to be beheaded.

Later, two or maybe three days later-when Elisheva was gone, time became a round prison cell-Shaul lay sprawled on the backseat of a large Volvo. The windshield wipers intermittently smeared then erased the chilly, misty October night. Next to him on the car floor lay a pair of crutches. His left leg, fractured from ankle to knee, rested on a frayed old cushion, and he stared at the whiteness of the cast moving this way and that, as if struggling to understand how it concerned him. Esti, his brother Micah's wife, was driving, and they had been driving for almost half an hour without managing to strike up a real conversation; every sentence they uttered stirred in him a sense of dejection. She was five years younger than him, maybe six, he couldn't remember for sure, and he always felt even drier and more shriveled up than normal around her. His long, thin limbs, his sharp face, even his prominent Adam's apple, all seemed exaggerated when she was near him, with her full body and her dark, broad face. Every time she looked at him in the rearview mirror, he reminded himself of one of those old wooden rulers his father used to have, a grooved yellow yardstick that folded up into thin segments. As she had helped him into the backseat, there was a moment when almost his entire body had rested on her shoulders, and she didn't even grumble. If his weight had been hard for her to bear, she probably thought it was just because of the cast; he knew he had no weight in her view, and that her body was making the inevitable comparison between him and his brother. She glanced in the mirror, alarmed by his sigh: she had never heard him this way.