Dana remained with the younger man for five months. The days and nights when she would return to their apartment after making love to him, or during which she would endlessly check her phone for his texts, were nearly unbearable for Rafi. He would sit smoking a joint on the terrace, surrounded by the brown, shriveled potted plants that hadn’t survived the brilliance of the Israeli sun, and sometimes he listened to the sea, and sometimes he realized that he was talking aloud to himself. What did the young boyfriend give her that he didn’t? He, who all his life had been a dancer, had always found that everything began and ended with the body, but Dana was an actress and a playwright, and she had always moved as fluently and swiftly in language as she had through space, and he couldn’t always reach her there, in the realm of words. Could the boyfriend? Rafi had experienced enough pleasure in new bodies to know how exciting it was; that much he didn’t have to imagine. And yet of course he couldn’t help but imagine it all, regardless. He drove himself crazy imagining it, and when at last he couldn’t take any more pain, he broke down and asked Dana to end the relationship with the boyfriend, but two days later he changed his mind again, having absorbed the fact that if she ended it because he’d asked her to, that might also be the end of the experiment, and he was no longer who he had been before it began. In other words, he no longer wondered whether he was a man for whom the main force in his life was the one woman he was married to. He was finding things out about himself, his sense of himself was expanding, and he didn’t want to lose his new freedom, however painful it was to live next to his wife while she enjoyed hers.