I was along for the ride, I told myself as Friedman shifted gears. To get away from the sirens for a while, and because I liked the Judean Desert as much as I liked anyplace: its smell and its light, its millions of years, several thousand of which had been written into me via sources known and unknown, inscribed on a level so deep that it couldn’t be differentiated from memory. If I didn’t ask exactly where we were going or why, it was because I didn’t want to know. What I wanted was to lay my head back and close my eyes, to put myself in someone else’s hands for a while so that I might rest and not think.
Rest, but also, I’d have ventured had I not been so dead tired, so that I might be swept toward someplace that I hadn’t meant to go. It was a long time since I’d allowed that to happen. It seemed to me now that I’d been making plans for myself for as long as I could remember. Truly, I excelled in both the planning and execution: step by step, my plans came to fruition with such exactness that if I had looked more closely I would have seen that what drove my rigor was a kind of fear. When I was young, I thought that I would live my life as freely as the writers and artists I took as my heroes. But in the end I wasn’t brave enough to resist the current pulling me toward convention. I hadn’t gotten far enough along in the deep, bitter, bright education of the self to know what I could and couldn’t withstand—to know my capacities for constriction, for disorder, for passion, for instability, for pleasure and pain—before I settled on a narrative for my own life and committed myself to living it. Writing about other lives can, for a while, obscure the fact that the plans one has made for one’s own have insulated one from the unknown rather than drawn one closer to it. In my heart, I’d always known this. But if at night my body would twitch as I tried to sleep, as it did the night I agreed to marry my future husband next to a shining black lake, I would try to ignore it, as one tries to ignore the unexplained screw left over after assembling the bed one has to lie in. And not only because I didn’t have the courage to admit the things I sensed about myself, or the man I’d agreed to join my life to. I ignored it because I also longed for the beauty and solidity of the form, the one on which all of nature (and a few thousand years of Jews) bestows the greatest praise: the mother and the father and the child. And so I turned away from the accounting that would have required me to foresee what would happen to all of us once the form had been assembled, once the atoms had all aligned in us. Instead, fearful of the kind of violent emotion I’d known in childhood from my family, I harnessed myself to a man who seemed to have a preternatural knack for constancy no matter what happened within or without. And then I harnessed myself to the habit and schedule of a highly organized, disciplined, healthy life as if everything depended on it, as if my children’s well-being and happiness required this harnessing of not only all my hours and days but my thoughts, too, my whole spirit. While the other unformed and nameless life grew dimmer and dimmer, less and less accessible, until I succeeded in closing the door on it completely.
We drove up King George Street, passing the entrance to a park where I’d often taken my children to play and climb on a giant rope apparatus from whose apex they claimed they could see the sea. We had to make one quick stop before we could be on our way, Friedman told me. I thought maybe he’d forgotten something at home, and began to wonder about his life. I pictured his apartment filled with old books, and imagined a wife, large-busted, practical, with the shorn head of gray hair so common in a type of Israeli woman over sixty. Kibbutznik hair, a friend of mine calls it, though to me it always channeled the concentration camp, or would if the severity were not so often accompanied by huge earrings and a grandchild. A Yehudit or Ruth from Haifa. The father a doctor from Germany, the mother a pianist who gave lessons, both survivors, from whose darkness this Yehudit or Ruth had to free herself, though in the end she became a psychologist and spent her adult years trying to make sense of other people’s traumas. The kind of woman whose kitchen people liked to come and sit in when she wasn’t busy at work, who took a walk with the same two friends every morning for forty years. Already I loved her, this Yehudit or Ruth; already I was ready to take my place at her kitchen table covered in a plastic floral cloth and tell her everything. But it wasn’t Friedman’s apartment we were headed toward, it was the street named after the Dutch lens-grinder.
Friedman put the car into park in front of the building he’d brought me to two days earlier, where Kafka and the cats lived together in a state of unholiness, awaiting a verdict from the courts. I thought he was going to give me another lecture, but this time he got out and told me to wait. He would only be a few minutes, he promised, and before I could protest he slammed the door and started across the street with his cane.
The dog whined, watching until Friedman had disappeared into the building, then began to howl as if at some terrible injustice. She paced the cracked leather seat, gouged with a long history of such agitated waiting. I tried to soothe her, but not knowing her name or the words she would understand, couldn’t help. When she seemed as if she were about to choke on her own rapid breath, I climbed over the gearshift and into the back with her. She walked across me a few times before finally settling down with her catastrophe, front paws splayed on my lap. I pulled gently at the baggy skin on her neck, just as I did to the dog I’d lived with for almost as long as I’d lived with my husband.