Between Friends Read Free Page B

indistinct words of endearment. But if the cat should jump onto his lap asking for affection, he heaves him off with such disgust that I cringe. When I asked him to fix a stuck drawer, he not only fixed the drawer, but he also took apart and reassembled two wardrobe doors that squeaked, and asked with a laugh if he should fix the floor or the roof too. I ask myself what it was about him that attracted me and sometimes still does, but I have no clear answer. Even after his shower, his nails are black with machine oil and his hands rough and scratched. And after he shaves, there’s still stubble on his chin. Maybe it’s that constant dozing of his—even when he’s awake he seems to be dozing—that tempts me to try and wake him. But I manage to wake him up for only a short while, you know how, and that doesn’t always happen either. Not a day goes by when I don’t think about you, Osnat, and despise myself and wonder if there can be any forgiveness for what I did to you. Sometimes I tell myself that maybe Osnat didn’t really care so much, maybe she didn’t love him? It’s hard to know. You might think that I actually chose to do that to you. But we don’t really have a choice. This whole business of attraction between a man and a woman seems suddenly strange and even a bit ridiculous. Do you think so too? If you had children, you and I would have suffered a lot more. And what about him? What does he actually feel? How can anybody tell? You know so well what he should and shouldn’t eat. But do you know what he feels? Or whether he feels at all? I once asked him if he has any regrets and he said, “Look, you can see for yourself that I’m here with you and not with her.” I want you to know, Osnat, that almost every night after he falls asleep, I lie awake in bed and look at the moonlight coming into our dark bedroom through the crack in the curtains and ask myself what would’ve happened if I’d been you. I’m drawn to your stillness. If only I could absorb some of that stillness. Sometimes I get up and dress and walk to the door, thinking that I’ll go to you in the middle of the night and explain it all, but what can I explain? I stand on the porch for ten minutes, look up at the clear night sky, locate the Plough, then get undressed again and go back to lying awake in bed. He’s snoring peacefully and I feel a sudden longing to be somewhere else entirely. Maybe even in your room with you. But please understand, this only happens to me at night when I’m lying awake and can’t fall asleep and don’t understand what happened or why, and I just feel such an intense closeness to you. I’d like to work in the laundry with you, for example. Just the two of us. I always carry both your short notes in my pocket and take them out to read over and over again. I want you to know how much I value every word you wrote and also, even more, how impressed I am by what you didn’t write. People on the kibbutz talk about us. They’re surprised at Boaz; they say that I just walked past, leaned down, and plucked him away from you and that he, Boaz, couldn’t care less about which apartment he goes to after work or which bed he sleeps in. Roni Shindlin winked at me near the office one day, grinned, and said, So, Mona Lisa, still waters run deep, eh? I didn’t answer him and walked away in shame. Later, at home, I cried. Sometimes at night I cry, after he falls asleep, not because of him or not only because of him, but because of me and because of you. As if something bad and ugly happened to both of us that can’t be fixed. Sometimes I ask him: What, Boaz? And he says: Nothing. I’m attracted to that blankness—as if he has nothing, as if he came straight from a desert of solitude. And then—but why am I telling you this? After all, it hurts you to hear it and I don’t want to add to your pain. Just the opposite; I want to share your loneliness the way I wanted to touch his for a moment. It’s almost one in the