He stands shriveled and shrunken beneath her gaze, and it only increases her desire for revenge, makes her feel like telling him sweetly what he really is. Or maybe I was just in the mood-she later thinks despondently-to patronize someone a little, to remember the taste of it. But then finally, something he said before penetrates her brain: what had he mumbled about the mother? (And what are you doing getting mixed up with him?) "And what am I supposed to do, in your opinion?" she asks, still preserving the frost in her voice. "With your son."
He looks at her with his rooster eyes. "He's a good kid. Look, he won't make any trouble, I guarantee it. The smallest problem, come straight to me."
"Problem?" She laughs despite herself. "What problem?"
"No, no, he's good, really. He just has. it's … he has ideas, he has bees in his bonnet"-the creases of anger and craftiness on his forehead loosen up a little, and between his eyes she sees a pained and startled furrow of recognition-"and he's been with me since infancy, seeing as his mother died, bless her, when he was one month old, and I thought …"
He stops and gives her a look of stupidity and helplessness. She senses that he is a man with no echoes in his body. She crosses her arms and deliberates with herself. She has three girls, sixteen and a half, eleven, and eight, from three men, the last of whom left five years ago, and she knows what it's like, day by day, hour by hour. And this guy here, with his fleshy lips and crooked legs, with the "unloved" sign tacked to his back and chest. But who the hell is she to judge him?
"So what exactly were you thinking?"
He immediately senses her voice softening. A little hanger-on such as himself must be alert to any change. He quickly-too quickly for her taste-lets his shoulders relax, crosses his feet. "Well, I thought-now, don't get angry again, hear me out-I saw the sign here, yoga, so what did I think? That we're here for a week, me and the boy, and he's a good kid, honestly, but he doesn't have any friends. You see where I'm going with this?" And here he must sense that he's managed to cast an anchor in her, and he hurries to deepen it excitedly. "He's all alone. Nothing. He doesn't communicate. He can go a whole week-no communication!" He starts getting his confidence back, something about the goods he's selling her is going down well. "And he's a kid, believe me, you'll see him and you'll understand. You-you have a good eye. I could tell that about you as soon as I saw you." He leans forward slightly, lowering his voice. "The thing is that he's alone. No girls, girlfriends, that sort of thing. Nothing. So what did I think, what did I say to myself, I thought if you, if. "
"Come on already, spit it out!" Nili groans, growing tired of his transparent haggling, but possibly also tickled by hearing the words explicitly, like a scene from a B movie; after all, how many times in a lifetime do you get to hear a thing like this?
He swallows and tenses up. "I thought maybe you'd take him, take him privately, for money, make him a man."
He withdraws immediately and stretches out his small stature as tall as he can, and again he looks like a little rooster to her, feathers bristling, his fear making him dangerous. His narrow chest puffs up, he breathes rapidly, and one of his eyes starts to wander.
She stands with her arms crossed, nodding something to herself.
"Forget it," he suddenly bursts out. "Didn't happen. Never mind. Forget about it." And he turns to walk out of the room. He must have scared himself, Nili thinks. Must have been alarmed by his own proposal, by what his ears heard his mouth say. She doesn't know what's come over her-even later, when she reports the events to Leora, she finds it difficult to explain what happened, just that she suddenly knew it would be all right-more than all right, that it would be good. "It was like I guessed," she tells Leora, "like I guessed through him what was waiting for me there." She sighs deeply and her shoulders slouch. "And besides, me?" {Who has done it all, with all sexes and all colors, Leora silently completes her sentence.) "To be scared off by the idea of this kid?" Leora, on the phone at home, quickly wets her lips in preparation for an intense discussion, but Nili always knows when to simply close her eyes in enjoyment and hug herself. She laughs quietly. "So I thought to myself, Let the kid come, we'll have a little talk with him, give him the facts of life, and let him know what's what. What's the worst thing that could happen?" And so she hurries after the man who is now fleeing her, and once more she feels as if something was revealed when he said those things to her. When he turns to her, she sees shame in his red brimming eyes, and she says to him softly, deeply regretting what she had done to him thus far, "Send him over now, I'll wait for him."
"Okay, but I'm paying," he almost shouts.
"You're not paying anything, it's on the house." She laughs.
"But it's extra," he insists, sniffling.
"No need. Send the kid over."
He stands confused for a moment, suspicious, unable to comprehend the economic logic. But he still wants to thank her somehow, so he digs through the pockets of his too-tight pants and cannot find what he's looking for, doesn't even know what he's looking for. He finally tries to shake her hand, but their fingers miss each other. "Listen, if you ever need anything up north, at the quarries …"
I put down the pages, lunge for the cup, grab it with both hands, and drink huge gulps of water. I haven't dared to look at her until now. And I'm dying for a cigarette. Dying. How silent she was while I read. Abysmally silent. And I held the pages up between myself and her the whole time, with both hands, but the trembling only let up for the last few lines-
"Until this moment," she says softly, "I didn't know what it would be like."
"And now?" I force myself to look straight at her. Now the criticism will come. She'll say it's not her taste, it's too complicated for her now. "Smart aleck," she'll say, and she'll tell me to leave it. What does she know? What can she really make of all this, in her condition? And if you think about it honestly, when was the last time she held a book in her hand since high school?
"For a few months now, I've been lying here and thinking, What, she'll sit here next to me and read, and then what? What will happen to me?" Her voice is distant and stiff. It hadn't occurred to her to wonder what would happen to me. Old habits die hard. "So you wrote that story, after all," she says slowly.
I can't decipher her reaction. I have no idea whether what I've read up to now reminds her in any way of what happened there, if I'm even close. If that was how they spoke, she and his dad, if that was what went through her mind when he came to her with his proposition. I know so little, almost nothing. "Take him privately, make him a man"-that happened, she told me that as a kind of joke, I suppose, the day she came home. Maybe she thought it would en-
tertain me, an amusing anecdote from her job; it had turned my stomach. There were another couple of details that trickled down to me, even though I tried hard not to let them, and of course I know the ending. But in the middle there was a black hole, the chasm of her silence that stretched out from then until today. And now too, in fact, what is she telling me? Nothing. She breathes heavily. Not because of me. I hope it's not because of me right now. Every breath costs her an effort. She's very large and bulky. Fills up the whole bed. I arrange my pages for the third time, not knowing whether I should go on reading or wait for her to say something, give me a sign, a direction. Nothing comes. The most exasperating thing for me is to discover how little I had imagined while I was writing at home in London, what I would feel here when I read to her. My pretension horrifies me, and my brilliant stupidity: did I really think I could sit here with my legs crossed and tell her a story I'd made up about her and him?