“I mean you’re not ugly, or anything, Nathan,” said Chaya, “but put something on, okay?”
“I’m naked!” said Nathan. He looked down at himself, and knew that he was naked. And he saw, as through Chaya’s eyes, that in assuming some of its manly proportions and features, his penis had also begun to take on a concomitant forlorn and humorous aspect, sort of like the Jeep in Popeye cartoons; and he made an apron of his hands and forearms. This did nothing to conceal, however, the whiteness of his thighs, or the soft, sad divot of hair around his left — but not yet his right — nipple.
“There’s a towel on the chair.”
“I’d better go,” said Nathan. He turned and began to walk out the door, attempting now to cover his probably ridiculous-looking rear end.
“It’s okay, go ahead, put it on, Nathan,” said Chaya.
“They brought me,” he said, turning again and crab-walking over to the chair beside Chaya’s desk. “The guys. Tiger and Buster and Felix E.” Hurriedly he wrapped the towel around his waist and tucked in one end, in the fashion that his grandmother had always referred to, for some reason, as Turkish. It was a scratchy white towel that had been stolen, to judge from the illegible Hebrew lettering that was woven like a pattern into one side, from some hotel in Israel. The lopsided situation of his chest hair remained a keen embarrassment, and the towel was so skimpy that the knot at his hip just barely held.
“Are they out there?”
“Yeah. They sent me in. They said—”
“Your hair is all wet.” She folded her hands over her stomach, on the pleat of the bedclothes, and stared at him. She seemed all in all only mildly surprised to see Nathan, as though he were visiting her in a dream. Her face had grown wider, her cheekbones more pronounced, since the last time he had seen her, and with her tawny skin and her thick eyebrows and that big, wild hair Nathan thought she looked beautiful and a little scary. He sat down and hugged himself. His teeth were chattering.
“Okay, now I better go.” He stood up again.
“Wait,” said Chaya. She patted the sheets and indicated that he sit beside her. He came to sit gingerly at her feet, keeping hold with one hand of the tenuous Turkish knot.
“Nathan Shapiro,” she said, shaking her head.
“Chaya Feldman.”
“Mrs. Falutnick’s class.”
“Kvit chewink your gum in fronta da r-radio,” said Nathan, repeating a favorite inscrutable admonishment of Mrs. Falutnick’s in an accent he had not mimicked for six or seven years. Chaya laughed, but Nathan only snorted once through his nose. It had been so long since the days of Mrs. Falutnick’s class! He saw himself sitting in a flecked plastic chair at the back of the droning classroom in the Huxley Interfaith Plexus, defacing with moustaches and monkey’s fur the grave photographs of Emma Lazarus and Abraham Cahan in his copy of Adventures in American Jewry, furtively folding all ten inches of a stick of grape Big Buddy into his mouth when Mrs. Falutnick turned her enormous back on the class, and at this he was unaccountably saddened, and he sighed, startling Chaya out of her dream.
“I heard your parents got a divorce,” she said. She looked down, and her long hair splashed her folded hands.
“Yeah,” said Nathan, hugging himself again. The shiver that this word produced in him never lasted more than a second or two.
“Why did they?”
“I don’t know,” Nathan said.
“You don’t?”
He thought about it for a few seconds, then shook his head. “I mean they told me, but I forget what they said.”
“It’s complicated,” Chaya offered, helpfully. “People change.”
“I think that was part of it,” Nathan said, but he didn’t believe that there was really any explanation at all.
“Does your dad still live around here?”
“He moved to Boston.”
“That’s cool,” said Chaya. She lifted the curtain of hair from her face and smiled another crooked smile. “I wish my dad would move to Boston.”
Nathan said automatically, “No, you don’t.” He had hitherto managed to forget about the fearsome doctor and he glanced over his shoulder. In the far corner of the room he noticed three large plastic suitcases and a guitar case, neatly lined up as for an imminent departure.
“Where are you going?” he said, gesturing toward the luggage.
“Jerusalem,” said Chaya. “Tomorrow. Today, I guess. Later this morning.”
“With your family? Or all alone?”
“All alone.”
“Are you ever coming back?”
“Of course I am, you,” she said. “My father thinks I’ve gotten — he just wants me to learn to be an Israeli.”
“Oh,” said Nathan. He was not certain what this entailed, but he suddenly pictured Chaya operating a crane on the bristling lip of a giant construction site in the desert, lowering a turbine generator or a sheaf of I-beams down into the void, the dust of the Negev blowing around her like a long scarf.
“Did they tell you I put out?” said Chaya. “Those guys?”
“Kind of,” said Nathan, taken aback, before it occurred to him that this was admitting he had come here for sex, when in fact he had come — why had he come? “It was more like a dare, I guess,” he said. “They sort of more or less dared me to come.”
“None of them’s ever sat on my bed the way you are,” said Chaya.
Nathan wondered for a moment exactly what she meant by this, and then, in the next moment, leaned toward her and kissed her lips. This was done only on an off chance and he did not expect that she would take such forceful hold of his body. Startled, without a clue of what he ought to do next, he put one hand on the nape of her neck, the other at the small of her back, and then he lay very still in her arms. He could feel the bones of her hips pressing against him, like a pair of fists, and his lips and somehow his breathing became entangled in her hair. The laundered smell of her bedclothes was overpowering and sweet.
“Are you a virgin, Nathan?” she said, her mouth very close to his.
He considered his reply much longer than he needed to, trying to phrase it as ambiguously as he could. “In a manner of speaking,” he said at last, blushing in self-congratulation at the urbanity of this reply.
Her grip upon him relaxed, and she drew back slowly and then fell back against her pillow, looking calm again. He had the feeling that she had been hoping for some reply totally other than the one he had given. Then Chaya sighed, in a bored, theatrical way that to Nathan’s ears sounded very grown up, and he was afraid, at last, that she really might have become a skeezer, that it really was possible to lose track of someone so completely that they turned into someone else without your knowing about it.
“Can you still draw eyeballs?” he said.