home. I was terrified. Does it look awful?”
“I’m telling you, you can hardly see it.”
“But I can feel it.” She touches the right corner of her upper lip, pushes it slightly up. “I keep thinking my face is falling to one side.”
“But you really can’t see anything, Ora’leh.”
“It’s just a couple of millimeters that I can’t feel. The sensation in the rest of my lips is totally normal.”
“Yes.”
“It should go away at some point. It won’t always be like this.”
“Of course.”
They walk down a narrow path among orchards of strawberry and walnut trees.
“Avram, tell me something.”
“What?”
“Stop for a minute.”
He stands waiting. His shoulders hunch up.
“Would you mind giving me a little kiss?”
He comes up close to her, rigid and bearish. Without looking at her, he hugs her, and plants a decisive kiss on her lips.
And lingers, and lingers.
“Ahhh.” She breathes softly.
“A-ah.” He sighs in surprise.
“Avram.”
“What?”
“Did you feel anything?”
“No, everything’s normal.”
She laughs. “ ‘Normal’!”
“I mean, like you used to be.”
“You still remember?”
“I remember everything.”
“Remember how I get dazed from kissing?”
“I remember.”
“And that sometimes I almost pass out from kissing?”
“Yes.”
“You be careful when you kiss me.”
“Yes.”
“How you loved me, Avram.”
He kisses her again. His lips are as soft as she remembered. She smiles as they kiss, and his lips move with hers.
“One more thing—”
“Hmmmmm …”
“Do you think we’ll ever sleep together?”
He presses her against his body and she feels his force. She thinks again of how much good this journey is doing him, and her.
They walk on, at first hand in hand, then they let go. Threads of new awkwardness stretch out between them, and nature itself winks behind their backs and plays nasty tricks on them, scattering yellow clods of asters and groundsel, blanketing purple clover and pink flax, erecting stalks of huge—but smelly—purple arum flowers, sprinkling red buttercups, and hanging baby oranges and lemons on the trees around them.
“Very arousing,” Ora says. “This walk, and the air. Isn’t it? Don’t you feel it?”
He laughs, embarrassed, and Ora—even her eyebrows suddenly feel warm.
He’s known Neta for thirteen years. She claims that she sat several evenings in the pub where he worked, on HaYarkon Street, and he did not take his eyes off her. He says he didn’t even notice her until she threw up and passed out on the bar one night. She was nineteen and weighed eighty-two pounds, and he carried her in his arms, against her will, on a stormy winter night—not a single cabdriver would take them—to a doctor friend in Jaffa. She squirmed in his arms the whole way, her gaunt limbs swirled around him and hit him mercilessly, and she hurled vile curses at him. When she ran out of those, she worked her way through the insults showered upon Sholem Aleichem by his stepmother, in the alphabetical order in which he had recorded them, calling him “carbuncle,” “forefather of all impurities,” “leper,” and “purloiner.” Avram himself mumbled the occasional choice curse to fill in what she omitted. When these ran out too, she started to pinch him painfully, and as she did so she laid out in detail the various uses one could make of his flesh, his fat, and his bones. Here Avram raised an eyebrow, and when she told him about the strips of wax she would be glad to produce from him, Avram—who never forgot a line he read—mumbled into her ear, “It was the idea also, that this same spermaceti was that quickening humor of the Greenland Whale.” This was a sentence he and Ilan had loved to quote in their youth, when Moby-Dick served as a particularly fertile ground for quotations. The tangle of vipers in his arms fell silent at once, gave a cross-eyed glance at the heavy monster exhaling condensation into the downpour, and noted, “There are some similarities between you and the book.”
“She was nineteen?” Ora asks. And thinks: I was sixteen when we met.
Avram shrugs. “She left home at sixteen and wandered around Israel and the whole world. The gypsy from next door. About two months ago was the first time she ever rented a real apartment. It was in Jaffa. Yuppified, you know.”
Ora doesn’t feel like talking about Neta now.
Reluctantly, she learns that Neta always looks starved—“not necessarily for food, but a general, existential starvation,” Avram explains with a laugh—and that her fingers almost always shake, maybe from drugs or maybe because, Avram quotes with a smile, “life zaps her at high voltage.” For years, she spent every summer living in an ancient Simca that