The pungent smell of drying paint. He let it fill his lungs.
The painter had signed his work. The name, Rodney Keller, was familiar to Aaron—a talented art postgraduate. At the art students’ opening last spring—another set of hors d’oeuvres Aaron had raided—Rodney’s intensely pigmented portraits had been on exhibit: people more vivid than life, their colors too sharp, their gazes so cutting and direct that the portraits were suffused with the hyper-real intimacy of a camera too close to its subject. Aaron had found himself taking an uncomfortable step back from those canvases. But this painting was different. Rodney Keller had painted Marisa not with the mannered exaggerations of those other portraits, but instead in the quiet, straightforward boldness of her beauty.
As Aaron stood before her image, elated and stricken, an unheroic question grew in him. He tried to resist it, and failed: Had Marisa slept with Rodney Keller?
Or, was Rodney Keller gay? He seemed gay to Aaron. Seemed it, but Aaron couldn’t be sure.
He backed out of the studio.
Nearly a month later, he’d found her after a lecture by an Israeli journalist, titled “Our Side of the Story: An Israeli Perspective.” It was anything but coincidence—Anatol Ludman had announced the lecture to his class before the end of last term, and Aaron watched Marisa make note of the date and time—he even heard her tell a classmate that the event was only days before she was due in Israel.
The journalist’s weary lecture had been so thinly attended, Aaron couldn’t help wonder whether Jewish Studies had deliberately underpublicized it to minimize the inevitable protests an Israeli speaker would draw. But the small audience made for a deeper-than-usual question-and-answer period, which continued until only the journalist and a small knot of audience members stood at the front of the hall—among them Marisa, separated from Aaron by only three undergraduates, then two. Finally, at a broad hint by a portly professor Aaron recognized from the Classics Department, they all drifted outside, past the lone protester lofting a sign that read Zionists = Nazis, and into a nearby pub.
He waited until Marisa was on her second beer—he kept track from a distance, chatting with an undergraduate whose name he didn’t bother to learn, biding his time. When he approached her at last, his own untouched beer dangling casually in his hand, she grinned into his face. “I’ve been watching you,” she said, before he had a chance to say more than hello. “You’re more complicated than you seem.”
Surprised, he matched her grin, the afternoon turning suddenly weightless. “Is that so?” He leaned against the bar and raised his beer. “How do I seem?”
She took a swig from her beer. “You seem like a pompous son-of-a-bitch.”
He swallowed. He could smell the beer on her breath. “But now you’ve discovered . . . ?”
“I get the feeling there’s more to you.” For a moment she sounded utterly serious.
He could make out the shape of her breasts through her T-shirt. “Tell me,” he said, pleased that he sounded both gracious and smooth.
She leaned in and gave his cheek a light, stinging slap. “Tell you about yourself? No, thank you.”
He felt himself flush, but recovered quickly. “Then tell me about Israel. And don’t walk away this time.”
She sipped her beer once, twice, before seeming to forgive him enough to answer. She was going to do a few months on a kibbutz, she said, an intense language course combined with volunteer work to help her make the leap into life as a new Israeli citizen. Was sick of American Jewish culture, of American culture altogether—and by the way, the English could take a flying leap as well. As she spoke she watched Aaron, a challenge in her expression. She said, “I want to be with people who know what they care about and aren’t afraid to say so.”
For once he kept his mouth shut. He didn’t try to prove to her that he knew what he cared about. He couldn’t. Had he opened his mouth, he might have confessed that all he cared about right now was not making a fool of himself any more than he already had, not watching her recede out the door, across the courtyard, past the man packing up his Zionists = Nazis poster outside the windows, and away into the city—the last glimpse of her he’d ever catch.
He said—had he ever said this to a woman, and was it as much of a cliché as he feared it was?—“Tell me more.” And then listened, or tried to. When she turned her sharp, teasing questions on him, he answered as carefully as though he’d been wired to a polygraph machine. Because he knew, somehow, that to be glib with Marisa would bring an end to the conversation once and for all.
An hour later they were in her room, their bodies a slow, winding tangle on the sheets.
It was impossible for him to pinpoint, after, what was different. He looked at her body, and at his own, and his chest caught as though on a hook. Something in the room had changed. The floor of her dormitory room was still strewn with items yet to be added to her half-packed suitcases—but the light from the small window above her bed had melded with the glow of her skin and the golden sounds of the sliding sheets and the bright heart-pounding world outside, as though some unspeakably precious substance were being fused, and the only words that came to him—words like holy, like sacred—belonged to things he didn’t believe in.
Their bodies were at an angle: her muscled calves cantilevered on Aaron’s long shins, her body reclining against the wall in an echo he couldn’t resist, and he confessed, “I saw your portrait.”
Marisa laughed. Her face was to the ceiling; he saw it in profile.
“Did it turn you on?” she asked. “People say that.”
He didn’t trust himself to speak. He prepared an enigmatic smile, which she did not turn her head to see.
People.
How many people?
“Rodney’s the man,” she said. And yawned, and kicked her legs into the air and rocked her trim body forward, hopping off the bed in a smooth motion and crossing to the bathroom.
The man. He almost laughed at the unfairness of the expression, an expression that, from her, could mean anything. And did people mean women, too? It seemed possible, anything seemed possible. Or did people simply mean besotted fools like him . . . a guy who thought the earth had moved even though Marisa apparently had not been left weak-kneed by what they’d just done on her gold-lit, rumpled bed? Maybe it meant fools whose dissertation topics weren’t invitations to disaster, who didn’t tighten their pecs when naked in front of her—in short, who were possibly (was it possible?) not intimidated by Marisa.
She returned with two glasses of tap water.
How was it that no gesture of hers could be servile? That she could bring him water naked, after they’d made love on her blanketless bed in her half-packed dormitory room, and he’d accept it from her knowing that he, and only he, was the barefoot supplicant.
Before they’d parted, while they still sat naked side by side on the bed, she’d set her water glass on the floor and taken his chin in her palm.
He met her gaze and tried not to blink.
“When I fall for someone,” she said, “it’s absolute and immediate.” Her gaze wasn’t ungentle—but neither did she seem worried about his feelings. She looked at him with the directness of someone making an inner calculus over which he was to have no influence. “Or else I know, absolutely and immediately, that I have no interest.”
He didn’t allow himself to duck her eyes.
“With you I’m not sure.” She released his chin but didn’t drop her gaze. “There’s something about you that makes me hesitate.”
A moment passed. Then Marisa’s expression eased, and she offered him a smile of unexpected softness. “I’m not used to hesitating,” she said.