Chapter 25 #5
I woke up at the crack of dawn and for a long time looked at Jean, naked, sleeping peacefully.
His chest rose and fell, and I reconstructed every detail of our lovemaking throughout the night.
How he was surprised when I went down on him and only managed to mutter, “I thought only port whores …” and then was silent.
How he directed himself to the exact spot that made me come with a cry.
How afterward we lay holding each other and kissing until we fell asleep.
My lips were still burning a little in the morning from all the kissing.
I heard my phone rattle from the living room and rose quietly to see who it was. It must have been 6:00 a.m., and I suddenly worried that perhaps something was amiss with Lily.
It was a message from Halimi.
“Still silent, detached from the world?”
I replied at once. “Still silent, but will resume speaking soon.” Then, I added three hearts.
“How’s it going over there?” I added after about a half a minute of staring at the phone.
I was surprised I felt no pangs of conscience for letting another man into our bed, not to mention enjoying it so much.
But it isn’t at our expense, it’s not at the expense of our time together, I told myself, it doesn’t make me love him any less.
I imagined Halimi down to the most minute details in some hotel room, getting dressed to go out for his morning walk.
And maybe Nina was there too? Now that I amused myself with this thought for a moment, not only did I not feel a pinch of anger; I might have even hoped it was so, just a little.
“Great. The interview went really well, and at noon I’m off to Paris. I miss you and Lily.” I wondered if he was in contact with my parents and realized that he probably was.
“I miss you too,” I wrote, even though I had hardly thought of him in the past two days.
But last night, when Jean was showering and I smoked the joint, I felt a surprisingly powerful longing for the routine of our life together.
For Halimi humming in the kitchen or talking on the phone while chopping vegetables for dinner or building some architecturally illogical structure with Lily on the carpet from her colorful wooden blocks.
“Remind me when you get back,” I added.
“Three more days, airhead,” Halimi replied along with a smiley.
Then, he added, “I bought Lily something really cool. And something cute for you too.” I smiled.
“I get home today,” I wrote.
“Take care of yourself, my Ditush,” he wrote.
“You too, Limush,” I replied and stroked the telephone with a finger.
I went to peek inside the bedroom. Jean had changed positions but was still sleeping deeply. Soon, I would have to wake him. With a heavy heart, I remembered Brunette whimpering beside the spring and assumed that she would wait for her master until he returned, even if it took an eternity.
I made coffee and lit a cigarette on the balcony.
The sun was already rising, and the morning was clear and bright.
What kind of a person am I? I asked myself, without guilt or shame.
I recalled my sister’s lectures on free love and felt a powerful urge to talk to her.
I did not remember when I had even spoken to her last. I assumed that I was not the first person in history who had been able to love both her husband and her lover, but it felt that way.
Each of them in a different way, with different depths, but even so.
But in fact, Jean loves me and his wife too, I thought.
And Halimi also loves me, and Nina, evidently, and she certainly did not stop loving him.
I tried to focus on the protracted painful feeling that I felt from their affair.
Why? I tried to understand in that moment. Why did it cause me so much misery?
The answer floated before my eyes: We are sitting in the living room one afternoon.
Lily and Halimi are doing a puzzle on the floor.
It must have been at the beginning of their affair, around that day when I told my sister I’d realized that Halimi no longer gave me those admiring looks.
The hours he spent at home also seemed to be getting shorter and shorter, and the need to “go out” was growing.
His perpetual air of distraction. Of course, all the obvious things—the blatant and persistent lies, that I was the last to know, and how stupid and empty and out of control it made me feel.
But what really destroyed me was that their love (or whatever it was, I thought spitefully) came at the expense of our love.
He sacrificed his attention to me on the altar of his attention to her.
I took a long breath and felt a deep and total calm. I went back to the bedroom and got back in between the sheets. I hugged Jean from behind and took pleasure in the feeling of his body between my arms, pressed against my chest and belly, in sleep. I began to kiss him and teared up.
He turned over, opened his eyes blearily, and a whole range of expressions emerged on his face: happy to see me, a full scan of the room we were in, focus on my face, registering that I was crying.
“édith,” he said quietly.
“Jean,” I said, and all of the calm and the universal insight seemed to evaporate.
Jean sat and pulled me to him. He hugged me and stroked my hair without saying a word, without trying to comfort me or ask what happened. Something in my soul’s mechanics must have malfunctioned because somehow, maybe out of embarrassment, the crying turned into a kind of snot-filled laugh.
“Stop, I can’t,” I said as I rocked against his chest. “I’m such a damned cliché.”
“Pardon?” said Jean and turned his neck to see my face.
“Forget it,” I sniffed. “It doesn’t matter.”
We stood beneath the carob tree by the tiny puddle—me in my normal clothes, which made Jean laugh (“My lady, you look like a little peasant boy”), and him in his silk suit.
I needed to send him through the passage and go back again.
Nervously, I fingered the two coins in my pocket, and again I heard the disturbing hum that had accompanied the burning eyes, silently commanding me to return to my world. I was unable to approach the puddle.