"So should I take out that whole bit?" I ask in a voice struggling to be dry, and what comes out is a squeaky, choking sound, and I am also stung by a different kind of disappointment. "To tell you the truth, I also felt that it wasn't really him, the whole thing with the winning word, but I really don't want to give up that bit."
"God forbid, don't take anything out."
We both say nothing as we quiet ourselves. I've started getting used to these silences, and I even like them. They're so different from the noise we used to share. I also notice how quiet it is here. It's strange that you can't hear any sounds from the street. Exemplary Walter has done a wonderful job of sealing off his house. No world.
I moisten her lips. My eyes are very close to hers. I ask softly how she feels. She makes an effort to smile. "I wouldn't recommend it." She asks if it's hard for me. I say it isn't. It is. That it's really mixed up. I still can't tell her how it moves me, to be exposed to her like this, as if without my knowledge, and also somehow, without being able to prevent it, with a kind of self-anesthetization or self-abandon, to feel her finally reading my story.
"Listen, you don't happen to have any cigarettes in the house, do you?" And before I can apologize for the stupid question, she digs her hand beneath the mattress with a seductive smile and pulls out a crushed pack of Marlboros, not even Lights.
"Just open the window afterward. He mustn't find out or he'll kill me." She chokes down a giggle. "He might drown me in tears."
I light one for myself and one for her, and take a long drag. I haven't smoked for three months. It was part of the rehab I was asked to do, required to do, and I was hoping it was behind me, that I'd overcome it, but then suddenly this sucking urge came over me. I inhale and look at her. I watch the way her eyes shrink as she takes a drag, the sluttish pleasure of a huntress of delights lighting up in her. Her whole vitality is now contained in the cracked lips that pull on the reddish glow, and for an instant it's as if a curtain has been opened and I can see her as she is, as she should be, as would make her happy, probably, were she not trapped in my little dictatorship.
As always when we reach this juncture, I am struck by the thought that maybe I never really understood what I had been given in the blind lottery of life-what I had won. And again, as usual during these attacks of mental weakness, it's a short road from here to wallowing in the swamp of if-only: How did it happen that I am the only person on the face of this earth whom she is somehow incapable of completely reading? What rare misfortune placed me in her blind spot? And yet I know that even that is not completely accurate, because that is exactly how I wanted it, that's what I fought for, and was slaughtered for. To strengthen my failing soul, I remind myself of all her transgressions, and remember with horror that I have a fairly long list of them further on, a choice little minefield. I sigh and say, "Okay, well, don't tell Melanie either."
"She doesn't let you smoke?"
"Are you kidding!"
We both inhale with a strange delight, somewhat hysterically, filling the room with clouds of smoke and choking with laughter.
"When you were born, you were a little pint-size thing, and you were in the preemie ward for three weeks. I wouldn't let you stay there alone."
"Really?" Instinctively I straighten up in my chair, already hearing the impatient dryness in my voice. You're such a shit, I think to myself, why are you fighting her? Give her the pleasure now, gift-wrapped.
"And I plunked myself down there for three weeks, and the nurses yelled and the doctors threatened, but it didn't do any good, I got under their feet in there for twenty-one days, sunrise, sunset,
drove them all mad. Well, that father of yours was always very busy, and I wouldn't have trusted him with something like that anyway."
The shadow of a smile filled with satisfaction, almost craftiness, passes over her face. That's how I should have taken a picture of her, assimilating the smoke and passing it through her corroded windpipe and bronchi, happily scorching them.
"At night I would sit among the incubators with the preemies and talk to you, and sing to you, and tell you about Siddhartha and Vishnu and Parvati. I told you all the stories I knew. They thought I was crazy. They weren't the only ones." She titters. "They said to me, What can a little thing like that understand? There was this one nurse there, Kurdish, I think, but a real sharp woman, and she said to me back then, Your girl will grow up, she'll be a writer."
"Oh, so now we know."
"I even gave you massages in there."
"Massages? But how. it's supposed to be sterile!"
"Well, you turned out all right, didn't you?" Her thick fingers stretch and move around of their own accord. "I would put my hands through the rubber circles on the sides. You were like a little chick, and you were a bit translucent too, I could see all your veins."
A warm fingerling darts through my stomach. Me? Translucent?
As he arches his back, she inquires again, matter-of-factly, whether his father asks about what he's doing here all these days. He laughs. "My dad can ask all he wants." She tries carefully to understand the nature of their relationship, tries to paint his world, to guess what might nourish him when he goes back there.
"What do you do, say, when you go home for Shabbat? Are there any friends that you-"
"No friends." He cuts her off and drops his pose, and Nili feels his heart chakra constricting in him with a quick spasm.
"Then what?"
"Nothing." He sits with his legs crossed, puts his head on his hand, and stares at the floor tiles. "We maybe go get lunch at the Burger Ranch, and that's about it. He sits in his room listening to the game, and I sit in mine, with headphones on so I won't hear."
"And you don't talk?"
"What do you want us to talk about?"
"Don't you have any-I don't know-topics of conversation?"
He stares at her intently. He has a kind of look, sometimes, as if he's peering at her over a thin glasses frame. You saw him, didn't you, his look says. Yes, she answers, I most definitely did. She tries delicately to explain to him, without explicitly using any cauliflower, that even our parents are somehow chosen by us. Meaning, we choose parents who will help us grow, gain strength, sometimes even overcome what they do to us.
"And do we choose our kids too?" he asks with bitter mockery.
She is confused until she realizes he means only his father and himself. She slowly absorbs his pain. "Yes, kids too." Then she assails him again: "But he loves you, you can't understand that yet, but when you have children …" She inflames herself, recalling his father's surprising tears of shame when he came to give her his proposal. Only now does she recognize the familiar combination, the mixture of immeasurable compassion and cruelty that only parenthood, it seems, can produce. "And just so you know, he may not know exactly how to say it to you, but I'm sure you are the most precious person in the world to him."
"He hates me, he hates me!" His voice rises and turns into a wail. "If he could make it so I would die, so I wouldn't ever shame him. You know what he calls me?"
She says nothing, remaining alert and tense. For a moment she can almost read his father's derogatory name for him in his eyes, but the word is quickly erased before she can get it-again that tail, the speckled one, wrapped around a tree, lingering, then disappearing.
He gets up, walks around, and lifts his T-shirt up. For the first time since they met she sees his bronzed, velvety back, ripped up and down and across with long stripes of strange scabbed pinkness. "He only stopped when I got taller than him."
As if he had been listening in on their conversation, his father comes to see her after their class. He slips inside the room. Her whole body is on edge. He stands with his rooster chest puffed up, a smile smeared on his indecent lips. When he sees her face he falters; he thought she'd be happy, that she'd tell him something about the kid. Still, he makes an attempt. "What's up? Since he's with you we don't see anything of him. He's a real handful, my son, hey?"