How do you manage to deal with the loneliness that’s part of writing?
I don’t. Who is your first reader?
I circle around Dikla on the days she’s reading my manuscript, waiting for her to say something. Waiting for her to fall asleep so I can see how much she’s read. And if she wrote any comments. Bottom line, I can’t do anything without thinking about what she will say.
The most difficult time was during my exile to the studio. She didn’t really send a messenger with divorce papers for me there after I returned from Colombia. She’s not that kind of person. She just asked me not to come home for a few days, or weeks, it was hard for her to know. She needed time to digest it all and decide what she would do. She also asked me not to call. So she wouldn’t have to not answer.
That was a dark time. I could barely move from the yoga mat because of my back pain.
I canceled all my writing workshops. And all my meetings. I didn’t tell anyone, at first. She asked me not to. And I didn’t know what to tell them. The situation was unclear.
The tone of her voice in our last conversation led me to believe that there was a real possibility I might lose her.
—
On our fifth date, she said that since she read The World According to Garp, she’d been dreaming of marrying a writer. That was the most personal thing she’d said to me until that moment. Most of the time she was silent, listening, and every now and then, she offered mature, astute opinions on a variety of social issues. It seemed to me that she was hiding a wound under all those adamant opinions. She majored in philosophy and business administration, an unusual combination, and she’d come back from London a few months before we met. She’d gone there on a trip, met a rich twenty-year-old Brit, and moved in with him. A year later, they had a bad breakup. She didn’t want to tell me any more than that. But whenever she mentioned him, there was more anger than hurt in her eyes. Maybe that’s why she’s so cautious with me, I thought, but never dared to ask. She wore tailored clothes. Restrained. Not Israeli. Not student-ish. She was my height without heels, and taller than me with them. It lent her an aristocratic look. Distant. Sufficient unto herself. But the way she moved her hands was remarkably impassioned and sensual. She had long, thin arms, and her hands opened so slowly that they seemed to be caressing, inviting.
It was like that for almost a month. Her body said, Don’t you dare come close to me, but her hands said, Come here now. I didn’t know what to do with that double message, and more than anything, I didn’t want to make a mistake, because from the first moment Ari and Meital introduced us at that club in Kibbutz Cabri, I’d had a sense of destiny. As if something very important was about to be decided. Or, in fact, had already been decided.
We went out four times, and at the end of each date, I didn’t know if there would be another one.
That’s how bad I was at reading her.
Then I told her that I write. Sometimes.
And she said those words, that she had always dreamed of marrying a writer, adding a flirtatious smile, the first flirtatious smile. She leaned slightly toward me, revealing her spectacular collarbone.
—
After we slept together, we lay beside each other in bed.
I remember that I said: Wow
And that she said: Wow.
I remember that I stroked her and said: You have a dancer’s body.
The truth is, she said, that I danced in the Ma’alot Hora group. And she giggled. They thought I’d turn out to be something.
And…you didn’t? I asked gently.
I didn’t pass the academy tests, she said. Truthfully, it was pretty humiliating.
I waited silently for the story, which did not come.
I still didn’t know that that’s what I’d always get, it was all her pride would allow: quick glances into the wounded area. And there would be something terribly frustrating and, at the same time, seductive about that.
—
I was twenty-four that night, an age when it’s still possible to have new dreams.
I can’t say that I became a writer to win Dikla’s heart, but I can assume that with another, less stimulating woman, I wouldn’t be writing.
When I left on a trek to South America a few months after we met, she was in the middle of the academic year, and she wasn’t the type to change plans for anyone.
One of us suggested that maybe we should see other people while I was away.
The same one, waiting in Amsterdam for his connecting flight, changed a bill for some coins to drop into the pay phone, and said, I take it back, I don’t want to lose you, you’re the love of my life, it doesn’t matter how long this trip takes, I’m yours. Yours alone.
I kept my word.
I wrote her long letters while I was away. Very long. Dozens of crowded pages. There were days when that was all I did: write to her. Ari showed exemplary patience. I remember a particular roof in a town called Tumbes in Peru that had straw chairs and a footstool on it, along with an ugly view of buildings. I didn’t come down from that roof for two days, and every time Ari came up to ask what was going on with me and when were we finally going to move on to another place, I said, Just a sec, bro, I’m in the middle of
