682
PARTISAN REVIEW
The city is sighing and settling down after a thousand and a thousand
and a thousand troubled years. From a distance, one doesn't see the bullet
holes in the walls or the small recesses on top of the walls from which
warriors in ancient times shot their arrows and rocks and other weaponry
which Victoria had seen that afternoon in the museum. No, from a dis–
tance the walls don't reveal the tumult or the turmoil within.
In
fact, the
walls are like a crown,
keter
in Hebrew, and the crown corresponds to
one of the attributes of God according to the Kabbalistic tradition.
Victoria likes to mentally review what she has learned - she gives
herself pop quizzes now and then, just to stay on her toes.
Marvin arrives before she can get to the essay questions. He stretches
out his hands to hers and says, "You - look - marvelous!"
"You don't look so bad yourself," Victoria teases him a little. He
picks up her hand and kisses it. H e is more affectionate toward her now
that they aren't having an affair than he ever was three years ago.
Over a dinner of shish kabob, hummous, falafel and Turkish coffee,
Marvin tells her that he is still teaching, writing articles on the Bible and
lecturing. Curiosity, not jealousy, prompts her to wonder if he is still
lechering his students as well.
"What about you?" he asks. "You've hardly told me anything. What
are you doing? Are you seeing anyone? You must have lots of chances in
New York."
Although they have exchanged a lot of information in their sealed
documents, Victoria has deliberately left out that salient piece of news.
She thinks it is bad manners to talk about another man to someone you
were once involved with.
She swallows a sip of thick, black coffee and says, "I was."
"Tell me about it," he leans forward in his interested, please-confide–
in-me-because-I-care-about-you manner.
"Well," Victoria sighs, "I was seeing someone but ... he got married
... to someone else."
Marvin is all sympathy as Victoria briefly relates that she met a man,
Ariel, whom she liked a lot but he was seeing someone else and she was–
n't ready to say yes,
I'll
get married and covert and have your babies so ..
. . As she speaks, she wonders how much of what she is saying is truth
and how much is what she wants to believe. She likes to think that if she
had changed her behavior, he would not have married someone else. But
what if, maybe, just maybe, he had actually wanted to marry this woman
for whatever perverse reasons of his own, and nothing she could do or say
would have prevented it? These suspicions have been circling in her mind
the entire time she's been in Israel, but these are not things she wishes to
discuss with anyone.
