rity and fervor, just laid aside for a while, for an entire life even, on a shelf at a pawnbroker's, waiting for Esti to gather up the courage to reclaim it.
Startled, she leaned forward, her muscles tensing around the internal mouth that had let out the secret, but in her inner space a man and a woman flew around in colorful revelry; like cutouts of a Keith Haring drawing, they hugged, danced, laughed, tossed handfuls of their love-stamen into the air. Those moments of lovemaking, she thought longingly, where the more you gush the more you fill up; she inhaled with an excited sound, and her heart dug at the walls of her body, and she blushed and was hot and girlish, and again she awoke herself and reminded herself of vows and engraved on her mind in cuneiform script that there was no place for this, none, no place for this, for this there was no place. And how once, just before they broke up, she called him at home when she knew he was out, and the bright voice of a woman answered "Hello," and again and again, the voice of a woman that gradually became small and sad, and the voice was like a slap on her cheek that she had been wanting for a long time, and she put down the receiver and laid her heart down on the table and took a meat mallet and smashed it with all her merciless strength: there is a woman there and there are children, and what are you doing?
It's not easy for me when she gets back from there, Shaul said, and she turned to him eagerly. I'm listening, she said, begging, almost demanding. A few days ago she happened to hear on the radio that there was a way to cheat a polygraph: you put a thumbtack under your foot and step on it during the test, and the pain alters all your reactions.
Shaul told her that when she comes home, he hugs and kisses her, and he always thinks she tenses up for a moment, in her stomach and shoulders. But he does not always find the strength to go to her, because not every day, he admitted, is he capable of the exhausting effort of pretending. There are days when the anticipation of her drives him out of his mind to such an extent that he is unable to even get up and open the door for her. He pulls her head onto his shoulder and is repeatedly amazed at her professionalism and perfectionism, because her hair smells like chlorine. He holds her face back from his and looks into her eyes and smiles, and she nods with a kind of distant sadness, pained, as if she understands exactly what he is doing and yet does not stop him. Then she breaks away from him with an apologetic smile, releases herself from the embrace, and he manages to keep his smile and dam his lips against the torrent of filth which almost erupts when he thinks about where she's come from and what she did there. But she's already far away, Shaul sees, very active and busy, rushing around the rooms, tidying up, making calls, while he has to pretend to have just woken up from an afternoon slumber. I'm quite good at doing that, he told Esti with a crooked smile, I actually find it easy to masquerade as a husband turned silly from too much sleep. Over the years he discovered that even if he were a less convincing actor, she wouldn't have noticed, because, she was so busy avoiding him, hiding the excitement that still colored her cheeks a vivid red. After a few minutes of hurrying around she is suddenly spent and collapses as if her last drop of energy has run out, and she lies down to rest. It's very difficult to catch the moment when this occurs: she disappears into her room-for some reason she does not take her siestas in their double bed but rather on the daybed in her little study-and instantly dives into an abyssal sleep, the sleep of a baby or an adolescent. He then-not out of nosiness, but out of amazement, out of true admiration for her thoroughness-quickly looks through her gym bag, and sees that the towel is wet as it should be, the bathing cap is damp, there is slightly less shampoo in the tube. He goes through this same routine every day, keeping his end of the bargain. He mustn't become sloppy and he will never give in, because, after all, these minute signs and tokens are, as he well knows, his one and only proof of her guilt.
Because, he thought, she has protected her secret perfectly over the years, and also with great elegance and professionalism, qualities which she has certainly picked up from her contact with Paul, who is an absolute perfectionist. It was this, in fact, which had eventually failed her and exposed her to Shaul, because it stands to reason-this was how he had formulated things a long time ago-that over the course of their twenty-five years together, there must have been at least a few cases, two, three, four, which should have aroused his suspicion. After all, she is not living in a bubble: she goes to the mall, to the bank, the garage, the clinic, lectures on all kinds of things, neighborhood committee meetings; every so often she takes part in professional conferences, sometimes out of town; she has meetings with the day-care parents, some of them men, and she and Shaul have three or four couples of friends, and in fact there are men everywhere. But she, in her determination to protect what she truly cherishes, has never once tripped up, never given anything away in her tone of voice or in a blush, or a choked-back gasp. Never has Shaul come home to catch her quickly hanging up the phone or covering a piece of paper on her desk with her hand. Never has he found a note with a suspicious phone number in her purse, or in the pockets of her clothes, and even when that man Paul burst into their kitchen, Elisheva was remarkably calm and businesslike, he has to admit, and she treated the incident as if it were a purely professional matter. She was generally so innocent and transparent and clear throughout that Shaul began to wonder what was going on and what she was hiding so perfectly.
Of course, he could not really believe that the moment a woman stepped out of her normal life, out of her trajectory, her furrow, she began to scatter-involuntarily, of course, without knowing it- some kind of chemical or biological substance which unconsciously affected every man around her, so that each one of them, every male Elisheva passed on her way from home to that "alone" of hers, was somehow influenced by this radiation, by the involuntary evaporation and percolation of primary essences, some sort of ubermammal pheromones. But even so, was it really a stretch to assume that the first ones to be swept toward the stamen of this hidden radiation, during those four days of hers each year, would be those who come in daily contact with her? Even if that contact is minor and perfectly innocent? Shop clerks, supermarket employees, the bank teller, the gardener who worked for them until Shaul fired him not long ago, her hairdresser, the guy who delivers rolls in the morning. And without her or them knowing a thing, their pheromones were aroused to create a chain reaction whereby they both interpreted signals transmitted to them from their complementary genomes. And of course these messages are not only limited to the men who are close to her, because evolution, Shaul knows, cannot suffice with such a limited number of contacts. And so the pheromones spread with ever-widening ripples, and mate with the sensitive receptors of every man in their way, and these men too are swept after her without even understanding what is happening, without even knowing whom they are following. Because what attracts them, of course, is not one private Elisheva but the attractants she emits from the moment she is not within the circle of the man she lives with-or the two men, in her case. That is what they react to. That sexual gravitation, that horizontal gravity, all those men who experience a seemingly inexplicable, mysterious shockwave, the ones who are uprooted from their homes, their lives, or their dinners every time Elisheva leaves her life and goes off to be alone.
He sighed a deep "oh," and something sparked in Esti, the way the grin on the guy at the counter had suddenly changed after the second time she dialed. She smiled, because his eyes had followed her as she walked to the door and stayed on her through the window when she left.