Rhyming Life and Death (8 page)

Rochele, wearing a plain short-sleeved cotton nightdress that reaches almost down to her ankles, buttoned all the way up to her neck. Did she manage to do up the two top buttons while she was peering through the peephole? Or is this the way she always sleeps, with her nightdress buttoned up to the top to protect her against whoever may be planning to sneak into her dreams?

Rochele Reznik smiles in surprise, with flickers of fear and joy on her squirrel face.

It's you? You've come back?

The Author, for his part, is surprised to discover that her night smile is less shy and embarrassed than her rare smiles earlier in the evening. His own embarrassment is so great now that he tries to mumble something, to gain some time, to invent some story, explanation or apology for her, and then turn tail and run.

His lips speak of their own accord: It's like this. Rochele. Look. I came back because I found I'd forgotten something. I mean, I'd forgotten something I really wanted to do for you before. And I didn't do it. See if you can guess. What was it I forgot to do for you?

She stands beside the door, that she has hastily closed and locked behind him, with her arms firmly crossed over her chest as a barrier, or to hide its flatness under her nightdress. Her voice is quite calm now (perhaps because her embarrassment level has fallen as his has risen, like some experiment in physics): I give up. What was it you wanted to do and forgot?

Will you hand me your book for a moment?

My book? What book?

Your book. I mean my book. The one you read from this evening at the cultural centre, that you read from so beautifully. I just wanted to write a few words in it, a little message for you, but I was so excited I forgot. It was only just now, half an hour ago, that I remembered. So I turned round and came straight back to you.

*

From the top of the bookcase a black-and-white cat eyes him with a haughty look, and winks ironically, as though there's nothing novel about this visitor, as though this is the usual pattern of life up here under the roof, every night, at midnight, some writer or other always turns up, blushing, after remembering
to come and write a personal message to Rochele Reznik on the flyleaf of his latest book.

Pleased to meet you. You must be Mister Joey? The Author advances, uninvited, into the middle of the room, to the bedside table, where he bends over and writes her a warm dedication, adding the name of jealous Joselito, then he bends over again and adds a drawing of a little flower and a bewhiskered cat's face that, for some reason, looks crafty and scheming.

Rochele says: Listen. I must apologise to you. I was wrong. When you brought me home I told you my curtains were at the cleaner's. And they weren't.

And a moment later: No. Actually it's not that I was wrong, but I didn't tell you the truth. I'm sorry.

Why did you do that? Was it because you were looking for an excuse to stop me coming upstairs? Were you a bit frightened? (His hand flutters for a moment, absent-mindedly, above her cheek. Not pityingly, or seductively, but something like late-night affection.)

Yes. I was frightened. I don't know. I felt shy with you. I honestly can't say now if I really wanted you to come up but I was afraid, or if I was afraid to say to you simply, listen, it's better if you don't
come up, or if I was afraid to say I was afraid. I don't even know now.

Hearing these words he draws her head towards him, presses her to his shoulder and holds her tight, so she can't escape. (Little frightened squirrel, please don't run away from me.) Meanwhile he notices that now, maybe because she has untied her plait for the night and her thick long hair is streaming halfway down her back, she is suddenly looking much less unattractive.

And like a shy girl, as his hand presses her head to his shoulder, she suddenly utters an unexpected question: Just now, I said, I don't even know now. Shouldn't I have said, Even now I don't know?

Hugging her shoulders he leans her back against the table and kisses her under the ear, an ambiguous, more or less paternal, kiss. But still he cannot stop the flow of his own words:

Well, let's see. You don't even know now? Now you don't even know? Even now you don't know? Now you even don't know? Now even you don't know? No, do you even know now? Please cross out those that do not apply.

Instead of which her lips tickle his neck, barely touching his skin, and only then does the Author
finally realise that he should stop talking. So he abandons his wordplay and feels embarrassed about the bristles that must have grown since he shaved this morning and may be scratching her. But the bristles seem to inspire her to scrape the back of his neck with her fingernails, not gently this time but with a sudden force. In response, he turns her round so she has her back to him, draws her hair aside, rests his lips on the nape of her neck, and moves his tongue lightly back and forth over the fine hairs until they stiffen, and ripples run down her back. Then he turns her again and kisses her lips cautiously, tentatively, and at once the kiss becomes deeper, their tongues moving back and forth, kisses that simultaneously quench and excite the appetite. He breathes in her smells, among which he thinks he can make out a faint smell of mouthwash with an almost imperceptible hint of lemon-flavoured yogurt and bread. This cocktail of smells enchants and excites him more than any perfume in the world. For one fleeting moment he is worried about his own body odour and the smell that may be coming from his own mouth, and regrets not asking if he can take a shower first, but how could he have done that? And now it is too late
to ask her anything because she has started pressing herself against him and seeking out his chest with her lips, with a certain shyness yet with an urgency or passion that overcomes her shyness and sweeps away her inhibitions, as though her own body is driving her along and begging her not to hold it back.

Now that she is pressing herself passionately against him he is anxious that she will be repelled or alarmed or even offended when she suddenly feels his erection through their clothes. But when she does discover it, far from being upset or repelled, as though her solitary dreams have prepared her for this moment, she holds him tight and squeezes her body to his, sending delightful sailing boats tacking to and fro across the ocean of his back. With her fingertips she sends foam-flecked waves scurrying over his skin.

Standing beside her single bed, it is not difficult for them to move from the vertical to the horizontal and soon they find themselves lying together on their sides (because the bed is so narrow). Just then something indescribable happens, a simple movement intended to make them more comfortable, a movement that they both happen to make at the very same moment, that they both happen to make in
perfect harmony, like a pair of dancers bringing off a precisely synchronised move after a hundred rehearsals, and this wonderful, unimaginably perfect movement makes them both giggle and thus removes any lingering embarrassment or tension from their path while heightening their excitement. And because the bed is so narrow they have to go on lying on their sides holding each other tight and they somehow have to coordinate each move, like a
pas de deux
. And apart from a single meeting between an elbow and a shoulder the dance is perfectly fluid, which amazes him because he imagined that she was not particularly experienced and he does not consider himself exactly a virtuoso. When his hand moves down to her thigh she whispers: Just a moment, let me go and shut Joselito in the shower, he makes me feel awkward. And he whispers back: Let him watch us, who cares if he gets jealous? He may pick up a trick or two.

He hears her talking to the cat in a warm, affectionate voice, before she shuts the bathroom door. Then she is back in bed, lying on her side, holding and stroking him, neither of them sure what to do next, until his fingers stray over her breasts through
the cotton nightdress, and she enfolds his hand in hers and guides it away from her small breasts that have always caused her embarrassment, and as though to compensate him she moves it down to rest on her belly.

Recovering the urge to speak he says in a muffled voice, Listen, Rochele, but he gives up when she stops his lips. Instead he kisses her forehead, her temples, the corners of her eyes, beneath her ears, in the hollows of her neck, where it curves down to meet her shoulders, and where the touch of his lips tickles her slightly. These kisses are designed to bribe her or distract her attention from the slow, stealthy progress of his hand, which does not rest on her belly where it has been placed but is creeping steadily southwards. But Rochele stops him: Wait for me a moment, she says, I'm still a bit scared. And he stops obediently and whispers: You'll be surprised, little squirrel, but I'm a bit scared myself. It's not just you.

And even though he does not consider that there is the slightest resemblance between her shy apprehension and his own fear of failure, in fact the two fears are rather similar. She probably sees him as an experienced lover who is bound to find whatever her
untaught body can offer him disappointingly bland, while he, as usual, is afraid that his desire will abandon him without prior warning, as has already happened to him several times, and then what will she think of him? Or of herself? What will she make of him bursting into her home at midnight, full of passion, only for it to turn out that his ardour was no more than posturing and deception? What will she think when she finds out that the man she imagined to be skilled and practised is actually no more virile than an overexcited youngster liable to shrivel up completely?

And indeed, no sooner does this fear enter his mind than it becomes a reality. After holding her tightly to him now he has to ease her body away to prevent her noticing what is missing.

Just a moment ago he was worried that she might become aware of his erection; now he has the opposite anxiety, that she may become aware of its absence.

A mischievous little imp scampers into his thoughts and points out to him that now they are quits: she has been taking care all along not to press her breasts against you, so that you won't notice how small they are, while now you are withdrawing your loins from her for more or less the same reason.

Should he whisper to her what the imp just told him? They could enjoy a liberating laugh together, which will relieve their anxieties and they will be left with no more worries or guilty secrets, nothing ridiculous or awkward, and then they can really start enjoying themselves.

But instead he hastens to silence the little gremlin and say nothing. Instead of whispering a comparison that is no comparison at all he starts kissing her shoulders, her flank, tactfully skirting her breasts but stooping to nibble at her tummy, and on the way, between kisses, he gives her a few skilful caresses that draw out from deep inside her a soft gurgling sound, like a low, long-drawn-out cooing.

While he caresses Rochele he closes his eyes tight and tries to recover lost ground by visualising the outline of Ricky's underwear, the asymmetric line of her knickers that was visible through her short skirt and caused him so much excitement earlier in the evening, before the literary event. He forces himself to imagine Ricky lifting her skirt up to her hips for him with one hand while slipping the other into her knickers and pulling them open at the crotch. And he also conjures up detailed pictures of
what must have taken place in the hotel room in Eilat between this same Ricky and her footballer lover, Charlie, or between Charlie and Lucy, runner-up in the Queen of the Waves contest, in the same room in the same hotel, or what might have taken place between Charlie and the two girls together, or between Ricky and Lucy in bed together on their own, without Charlie.

And when none of this helps him, he asks his imagination to transform him for a few minutes into Yuval, the young poet who hungers so much for a woman's body day and night that he despises his own life: so now you are Yuval, and at last you've been given a nearly naked woman's body, take it, do what you like with it, strip off her nightie and quench all your feverish thirst.

*

Rochele notices, or maybe she just guesses, his alternating pride and humiliation. Burying her face in the cavity of his shoulder she says in her innermost voice: Tell me that you're really here? Come on, convince me that it's not all happening in a dream?

Maybe it is because she believes it is all happening
in a dream that she does not stop his hand when it raises the hem of her nightdress above her hips. Not only does she not stop him, she takes his hand and guides it to another texture that feels finer and far silkier than that of her nightdress, a warm texture that discloses hints of folds and moist recesses to his touch, until he swells once more and has no need of poor Yuval or Ricky the waitress or the outline of her knickers under her skirt. Almost in an instant his desire rises to a level where the pressure to reach a climax stalls and gives way to a sort of sensitive physical alertness, pleased with its own sexual generosity, that gets a kick out of giving her thrill after thrill and postponing his own satisfaction, feeling to see how he can give her more and more pleasure, until she cannot take any more. And so, in complete self-denial – in every sense – with his fingers, now experienced and even inspired, he starts to steer her enjoyment like a ship towards its home port, to the deepest anchorage, right to the core of her pleasure.

Attentive to the very faintest of signals, like some piece of sonar equipment that can detect sounds in the deep imperceptible to the human ear, he registers
the flow of tiny moans that rise from inside her as he continues to excite her, receiving and unconsciously classifying the fine nuances that differentiate one moan from another, in his skin rather than in his ears he feels the minute variations in her breathing, he feels the ripples in her skin, as though he has been transformed into a delicate seismograph that intercepts and instantly deciphers her body's reactions, translating what he has discovered into skilful, precise navigation, anticipating and cautiously avoiding every sandbank, steering clear of each underwater reef, smoothing any roughness except that slow roughness that comes and goes and comes and turns and goes and comes and strokes and goes and makes her whole body quiver. Meanwhile her moaning has turned into little sobs and sighs and cries of surprise, and suddenly his lips tell him that her cheeks are covered in tears. Every sound, every breath or shudder, every wave passing over her skin, helps his fingers on their artful way to steer her home.