Chapters (33)
Two tears appeared in the corners of Nina’s nearsighted eyes. Without her glasses, she looked frail and dreamy, as though her face were much more naked than her body. They lay for a long while, holding each other tight without moving, like soldiers in a trench under shelling. Humiliated, and bound together by their humiliation. Until she broke loose, groped for a cigarette, lit it, and tried to say “Never mind, child,” and tried to make him understand that at this moment he was reaching deeper inside her than he could by screwing. Again she called him “child,” and said, Come and have a wash, and let’s put you to bed.
Fima, consoled and elegiac, laid his head in the hollow of her shoulder but pushed her glasses away, because he was ashamed of their naked bodies, ashamed of his shrunken member, wanting only to cuddle up to her, not to see and not to be seen. Close and silent, they lay sprawled on the rug in the dying firelight, listening to the raging wind and the rain beating against the windows and the gurgling of the water in the drainpipe, both of them soft and satisfied, as though they had made love tenderly and given each other pleasure. Suddenly Fima saw fit to ask:
“What do you think, Nina: have Yael and Uri made love together?”
The spell was broken. Nina pulled sharply away from his embrace, grabbed her spectacles, wrapped the tablecloth around herself, abruptly lit another Nelson, and said:
“Tell me. Why is it you can never keep your mouth shut for five minutes on end?”
Then he asked her what it was exactly she had liked about his article in Friday’s paper.
Nina said:
“Wait.”
He heard a door slam. A moment later came the sound of rushing water as the bathtub filled. He rummaged in his heap of clothes, searching all the pockets for his heartburn tablets. Self- mockingly he repeated Ted’s words:
“You’re looking a little run down.”
And Yael’s:
“What an ass you are.”
When Nina emerged twenty minutes later, scrubbed and scented, in a brown bathrobe, eager to make up, she found her husband’s clothes scattered on the floor, the fire dying, and the furry slippers Uri bought in Portugal lying like dead kittens by the door. Fima had vanished. But she noticed he had finished his drink and forgotten the book about Leibowitz and also one of his socks, hanging on the back of a chair in front of the fire, which flickered for a moment with its last remaining strength then expired. Nina picked up the clothes and slippers, cleared away the glass, soup bowl, and sock, and straightened a corner of the rug. Her thin, well-shaped fingers, like those of a pretty Chinese child, groped for a cigarette. Through her tears she was smiling.