But it was too late. In the meantime, Dana, who had taken his pain to heart and did not want to destroy their marriage or their family, had told the boyfriend that they had to end things. And he came to agree: the situation was too much for the boyfriend, too. He wanted to have children, and though he was in love with Dana, he wished to find a woman he could make a life with, one his own age who wasn’t already married to someone else. Dana was heartbroken, and even more so when she found out, soon afterward, that he had begun to date a yoga teacher. She watched his online activity on WhatsApp so closely that she could tell when he was doing something outside of his normal schedule. If she texted him, she waited to see how long it took for there to be two blue checks, and if the checks stayed gray, she was miserable, and if the checks became blue, even if he didn’t reply, she knew that he still thought about her. Dana missed everything about him, but most of all, she became obsessed with the sex that she’d had with him.

During this period, Dana spoke to her so often about the size of the boyfriend’s anatomy that at a certain point, after many weeks and months, she finally had to tell Dana that she could no longer hear about it. Though she understood that it had become a sort of stand-in for many other things that Dana wanted or needed, all the same she found it hard to relate to Dana’s obsession, since, in her experience, an enormous penis wasn’t always the most comfortable sort to have inside you, especially when one had a fine penis at home already, one that had been enjoyed for twenty-three years, belonging to a man with whom one had gone through so much and still loved. To this, Dana replied that what had looked like happiness had, in the light of fresh experience, turned out not to be happiness after all, but something she’d told herself was happiness because she hadn’t known better. But we very rarely can know better, she pointed out to Dana, we simply know something different, since our memories of the past must always adjust to keep our stories coherent. A point with which Dana agreed, but was helpless to employ.

It was around the time that a ban had been placed on the discussion of the penis that, during one of the many terrible fights that Rafi and Dana had, Dana had let something about it slip. She had said it, and once she had, there was no way to take it back. After that, according to Dana, the fights became more violent, and for the first time in their long relationship, the illusion of equality began to break down. Money, which Rafi earned and Dana did not, moved from being something that simply made it possible for them to live to being a source of power, since now Rafi lost no opportunity to remind her that she was dependent on him, that he was the one working a job all day while she was at home trying to write her play. In time, Dana came to feel that the experiment of opening their relationship had only brought pain and confusion, and that whatever growing they had done had only brought misery.