Great House (16 page)

When my parents called on Sunday afternoons I went on elaborately about the wonderful time I was having. For my father, I made up stories about the debates I'd attended at the Oxford Union and anecdotes about the others on the scholarship—future politicians, law students with sharp elbows, a former speechwriter for Boutros Boutros-Ghali. For my mother, I described Duke Humfrey's Library in the Bodleian where you could order up the original manuscripts of T. S. Eliot or Yeats, and the dinner I'd had at A. L. Plummer's invitation (before he'd rejected my thesis) at the Christ Church high table. But things were going worse and worse for me. In the state I was in, it was difficult to go out and meet people. Even to open my mouth to order a sandwich at the Tuck Shop required a desperate scavenge
for a few grains of assertiveness. Alone in my room, wrapped in a blanket, I whimpered and talked aloud to myself, recalling the lost glory of my youth when I considered myself, and was considered by others, a bright and capable person. It seemed that was all gone now. I wondered whether what I was experiencing was some sort of psychotic break, the sort that ambushes a person who until then has lived an ordinary life, auguring a new existence full of torment and struggle.

During the first week of November I went to see Tarkovsky's
Mirror
at the Phoenix, which has always been one of my favorite films. I continued to sit there after the lights went up, crying or on the verge of crying. At last I gathered my things and got up, and in the lobby I ran into a bright, loudmouthed, gay political science student named Patrick Clifton who was on the same scholarship as I. Flashing his pointy little teeth, he invited me to a party that night. I don't know why I agreed, since I was hardly in any shape to go. Out of desperation, perhaps, and an instinct for self-preservation. But as soon as I arrived, I regretted it. The party in South Oxford was held in a two-story house whose rooms were bathed in different shades of light, one purple, another green, giving the place a morose feeling, exaggerated by the music which I could only think to describe as Neolithic funereal. People were getting high on the stairs, and in the room where the music was loudest there was a motley collection of swaying bodies that seemed indifferent to one another. In the back was a long galley kitchen with cracked, dirty tiles, and buckets of beer on ice. Twenty minutes after we'd arrived I lost track of Patrick and, not knowing what else to do, went in search of a bathroom. The one I found on the second floor was occupied, so I leaned against the wall to wait. Laughter erupted from inside, belonging to two or even three people. It seemed unlikely that the occupants were going to come out anytime soon, but I continued to stand there. After ten minutes Yoav Weisz materialized in the blue-lit hall. I recognized him immediately, because he looked like no one
else. He had thick auburn hair that rose in high waves from his head and fell in a sweep across his forehead, a long and narrow face, very wide-set dark eyes, a steep nose that ended in arched nostrils, and full lips that naturally turned down at the corners, a face that could look beatific in one instant and devilish the next, and seemed to have come down from the Renaissance, or even the Middle Ages, without revision. You, he said, with a lopsided grin.

The bathroom door opened and a couple tumbled out, and at the same time a wave of nausea came over me and I knew I was going to throw up. I dove into the bathroom, lifted the toilet seat, and sank to my knees. When I finished I looked up and to my horror Yoav was standing above me. He offered me some cloudy water from the tap. While I drank it he watched me with concern and even tenderness. I said something about the food from the kebab van I'd eaten earlier. We sat in silence, as if, now that we had it, we were bound to stay in the bathroom for as long as the other couple had. I caught a glimpse of my reflection, dark and a little deformed in the mirror; I wanted to look more closely to see how bad things had become but was embarrassed in front of Yoav. Am I that hideous? he said at last. What? I asked, and gave a little laugh, though it came out more like a snort. If anyone's hideous—I started to say. No, he said, moving a strand of hair away from my eyes, you're beautiful. He said it just like that, with a directness that took my breath away. I'm embarrassed, I said, though I wasn't.

He reached into his pocket, took out a Swiss Army knife, and unfolded the blade. For a split second, I thought he was going to do something violent, not to me but to himself. Instead, he took the bar of soap sitting on the sink, a dirty bar caked with the grime of all the hands that had drifted in and out of that bathroom, and started to whittle. It was such an absurd thing to do that I laughed. After a while he handed me the soap. What is it? I asked. Can't you tell? I shook my head. A boat, he said. It didn't look like a boat, but that was fine with me. It had been a long time since anyone had made something in my honor.

It was then, looking at his strange face, that I knew that a door had opened, but not the kind of door my father had imagined. This one I could walk through, and right away it was clear to me that I would. Another wave of nausea came over me, nausea mixed with happiness and also relief, because I sensed that one chapter of my life had ended and another was about to begin.

Of course there were awkward moments, or moments that seemed to throw things into question. The first time we slept together something strange happened. We were lying on the carpet in Yoav's bedroom on the third floor of the house in Belsize Park. The windows were open, the sky almost black with an approaching storm, everything eerily silent. He took off my shirt and touched my breasts. He had very soft and inquisitive hands. Then he took my pants off. He didn't take off my shoes first, though, he just peeled my underwear down over the top of my pants and kept pulling until he reached my feet, at which point, of course, he got stuck. A struggle ensued, as they say in Russian novels, although thankfully it was a short one. My shoes came loose, and the pants slipped free. Then he took off his own clothes. At last we were naked. But instead of continuing in the vein we'd been going in, Yoav switched course and started to roll. An actual somersault, with me attached to him. Once we'd gone around 360 degrees, he started to roll again. I had gone along with plenty of strange or kinky things during sex, but this was the strangest because there was nothing remotely sexy about it, not for me, and, as far as I could tell, not for him. We were like two people practicing for the circus. You're hurting my neck, I whispered. That was all it took. Yoav let me go. I dropped back to the floor and lay very still for a while, catching my breath and trying to decide whether I wanted things to begin again where we'd left off, or whether I wanted to get my clothes and leave.

I was still undecided when I heard the muffled sound of crying. I sat up. What's the matter? I asked. Nothing, he said. But you're crying. I was just thinking of something, he said. What? I asked. One day
I'll tell you. Tell me now, I started to say, moving closer to him, but didn't get all of the words out, because then his mouth was on mine and I was pulled into a kiss soft and deep, as if he had reached in and performed some brisk emergency surgery with the most deft and delicate touch, causing something to surge and come alive, flooding me with vitality I had been deprived of. That night we had sex three or maybe four times. From then on, we were rarely apart.

When I was with Yoav, everything in me that had been sitting stood up. He had a way of looking at me with a kind of unabashed directness that made me shiver. It's something amazing to feel that for the first time someone is seeing you as you really are, not as they wish you, or you wish yourself, to be. I'd had boyfriends before, and I was familiar with the little mating rituals of getting to know each other, of dragging out the stories from childhood, summer camp, and high school, the famous humiliations, and the adorable things you said as a child, the familial dramas—of drawing a portrait of yourself, all the while making yourself out to be a little brighter, a little more deep than deep down you knew you actually were. And though I hadn't had more than three or four relationships, I already knew that each time the thrill of telling another the story of yourself wore off a little more, each time you threw yourself into it a little less, and grew more distrustful of an intimacy that always, in the end, failed to pass into true understanding.

But with Yoav it was different. He propped himself up on one arm and stared at me as I spoke, absently stroking my arm or leg, and interrupting me to ask questions—Who's she, you never mentioned her before, OK, go on then, what happened next? And he remembered every last detail, and wanted to hear not just the highlights, but everything, not letting me skip over any parts. He clucked his tongue and his face clouded over with anger whenever I narrated a part about some cruelty or betrayal, and grinned with pride whenever I described a triumph. Sometimes the things I told him evoked a quiet, almost tender laugh. He made me feel like the entire story
of my life had been lived for his audience alone. And he treated my body with the same attentiveness and wonder. He used to touch and kiss me with such seriousness—studying my face to gauge my reaction—that it made me laugh. Once, as a joke, he took out a notebook and after each caress jotted down a little note, speaking aloud as he wrote: Sucking the earlobe…semicolon…makes her…gasp. Then he would kiss and stroke me again, and take the notebook back up: Licking…the right…nipple while…letting hand…rove…over her…beautiful…butt…ocks…semicolon…A faraway…smile…spreads…across her…face. Another pause. Then: Putting…her toes…in mouth…semicolon…Makes the hair…on her arms…stand on…end and her…amazing thighs…squeeze together…Addendum…semicolon…A second time…makes…her…squeal…exclamation point. And yet the joke didn't end there. One day I got to the library and found the notebook tucked in among my books, and every page had been covered with Yoav's tiny writing.

His attention made me feel so clarified, so bright and exact, so moved, that I accepted, at least in the beginning, that while there was nothing that I wouldn't tell him, there were things about his family that he seemed unable to talk about with me. He never said so directly; somehow he just always found a way to avoid answering.

I tried to learn him. I studied the beauty marks on his body, the shiny scar like a train track above his left nipple, the misshapen nail of his right thumb, the little field of golden hairs where his spine met the top of his backside. The surprising thinness of his wrists, the smell of his neck. The silver fillings in his mouth, the tiny capillaries at the top of his ears. I loved the way he spoke out of only one side of his mouth, as if the other stiffly refused to go along with what was being said. And I felt a little flood of love for the way he held his spoon while he ate cereal and read the paper, almost crudely, in opposition to the refined way he did everything else. When he read he curled a lock of hair around his finger. He had a fast metabolism. In order to avoid headaches he had to eat often. Because of this—and
because, after his mother died, there was only the food the housekeeper prepared, which wasn't the same—he had learned at an early age to cook for himself.

When he slept he threw off a heat that alarmed me until I became used to it and was even drawn to it. Once I read about children who lose their mothers and spend hours huddling near a radiator, and one night, drifting off to sleep, an image came to me of those children huddling against Yoav. It's possible I even dreamed of being such a child myself. But it was Yoav who'd lost his mother, not me. Awake, he was constantly pacing or tapping his foot. He needed to get rid of all of the energy his body produced, but there was something futile about such frenetic activity because as soon as that energy was used up his body would just manufacture more. When I was with him I had the sense that things were constantly in motion, moving toward something, a feeling that after the suffocation of the months before excited me and calmed my nerves at the same time. And if I sensed his sadness, I didn't yet know where it came from or the depth of it. Don't look at me like that, he used to say. Like what? I'd ask. Like I'm in the incurable ward. But I'm such a good nurse. How do I know? he asked. Like this, I said. Silence. Don't stop, he groaned, I only have one more day to live. You said that yesterday. Don't tell me, he said, on top of everything else I have amnesia, too?

It wasn't long before I gave up sleeping in my room on Little Clarendon Street and began to spend almost all of my time in London. You could say that I fled there, to Yoav and to his world at whose center was the house in Belsize Park. From the beginning, Yoav must have sensed in me a desperation, a willingness to match his intensity, to put aside everything in order to throw myself entirely into the only sort of relationship he knew how to have, a kind of cabal in which there was no room for anyone else, or anyone but his sister, whom he thought of as part of himself.

Right away, my mental state began to improve. Improve but not altogether return to its former self: a residual fear hung on, fear of
myself above all, and of what all this time had lurked within without my knowledge. It was more as if I'd been anesthetized, not cured, of whatever had ailed me. Things were not what they once were, and though I no longer worried that things would end for me in Bellevue, and even felt embarrassed to recall my pathetic behavior during the worst of it, I felt that something in me had been permanently altered, wizened, or even impaired. Some sovereignty over myself had been lost, or perhaps it would be better to say that the very idea of a solid self, never particularly sturdy in me to begin with, had fallen to pieces like a cheap toy. Maybe that's what made it easy for me to imagine—not right away, but as time passed—that I was, almost, one of them.

 

T
HE BEGINNING
was different. Everything about the life that went on in the Belsize Park house seemed to me foreign and elusive. Even the most banal things—the closet of expensive dresses Leah never wore, Bogna with her limp who came to clean twice a week, the habit Yoav and Leah had of dropping their coats and bags on the floor when they came in the front door—seemed to me exotic and fascinating. I studied them and tried to understand how things worked. I was aware of a private set of rules and formalities that governed things, but couldn't say what these were. I knew enough not to ask; I was nothing if not a polite and grateful guest. My mother had drilled certain manners into me. At the heart of them was the erasure of one's own leanings wherever another held in high regard was concerned.