“Is there a place to put my coat?” she asked.
“I’ll put it in the bathroom,” he said, reaching out to take the garment from her. He removed his own and went into the bathroom to put them over the shower rod.
Even though her coat was off, Wendy was still sopping wet, her skirt, shoes, and stockings soaked as well as her hair. The thin windbreaker wasn’t at all effective as a deterrent to dampness; her shirt too was soggy with rain. She didn’t want to sit on the bed or chair in her wet clothes.
When Noah came back from hanging the coats and saw her standing, he asked, “Do you want to sit down? I can make tea.”
She smiled at him. “I’d love to sit but I don’t want to get your blankets wet. Maybe you could lend me some sweats or something?”
“Sure.” Noah gave her the smile that showed the gap between his two front teeth. Once she moved her gaze from his teeth up to his eyes with their clear pools of color in the middle, looking more blue than gray today, she was immersed in him. He opened the third drawer of the dresser and rummaged among the jeans there to produce a pair of maroon sweatpants emblazoned “Oberlin Physical Education” in yellow letters. He tossed them over to Wendy.
She got up and walked toward the bathroom to change out of her skirt. Wendy returned to see Noah still standing in his wet clothing.
“Aren’t you going to change?”
“If I stay wet, I’m connected to taking Benj’s coffin to the airport. I . . . it will seem less final, for him and for Sam. Does that make sense at all?” he said, still standing looking down at Wendy now seated on the bed. “I was one of the last people to see him alive. It’s just so . . . overwhelming . . .” he sank down, soaked, next to Wendy on the bed and put his face in his hands, sobbing. Wendy put her arms around him to try to comfort him.
He looked up after a moment and said, “My tears won’t help. Let’s get warmed up.” He smiled at her, and she smiled. He got up, burrowed in the same drawer with his hands, and found a pair of navy sweatpants emblazoned “New York University” in white and went to the bathroom to change.
Wendy walked over to his bookcase. She picked up one of the few non-library books, an advice book titled, Now Decide: How Indecisiveness Is Ruining Your Life (whether you know it or not), with a price tag on the back stating that it was from Worlds Beyond Words. From the author bio, it seemed the writer himself wasn’t the world’s most decisive person, having had a career as a psychologist, Buddhist practitioner, journalist, and now Orthodox Jew.
Noah emerged from the bathroom barefoot and in sweatpants, still wearing his white button-down shirt, holding a very thin white towel, the kind found in cheap hotels. “This floor is so cold on bare feet. Come, I’ll dry your feet and give you some sweat socks. Then I’ll make us tea,” he said, beckoning her to where he was seated cross-legged on the bed.
She walked over and sat next to him, leaning forward slightly, her hands at her sides. Her curly black shoulder-length hair was still dripping onto her long-sleeved white cotton shirt. Would he kiss her again? Should she make a move? He carefully reached down for her bare feet, caressing them in his hands, and brought them to his lap. He was focused, methodical, starting at the tops of her toes, drying them, the spaces between them, the tops of her feet and finally her soles and heels. Once he had dried both feet, he began to stroke them, massaging carefully with his warm hands. Wendy liked watching him, his focus on her and her comfort. Suddenly she closed her eyes, to just have the physical sensation. She felt stimulated, wanted to be touched everywhere by those hands, have them comfort, probe, explore, caress. She heard Noah softly humming a niggun, a wordless melody, and was transported back to the Shir Tzion synagogue her first Friday night in Israel, and the voice she heard there, soaring above the others, yet harmonizing at the same time, distinctively, gorgeously individual while still contributing to the sound of the group. Noah’s niggun pulsated in her ears; his massage of her feet aroused her, but the other voice was echoing in her mind.
“Mmmm, feels so good,” Wendy said looking down at her feet on Noah’s lap, in his hands. “You’re . . . tender. I see you as a great dad one day, giving your kids baths, drying them off.” She smiled into his blue-gray eyes.
“I’ve always wanted kids. Now I just feel, they’re lucky, not aware of how awful a place the world is.”
“Let’s shut the world out and dry each other off, you and me, nothing else,” Wendy said, surprised to hear herself speaking so lubriciously, seductively.
“Sounds good.” Noah smiled at Wendy, showing his beautiful clear eyes and the irresistible gap between his top front teeth. He handed her the towel, now slightly damp from drying her feet, and swung his legs onto the bed. She crossed her legs and took his bare feet onto her lap. She stroked carefully each of the toes and then ran her finger over the middle of his foot, playfully from the end of his heel to the top of his toes. She encased all of one foot, then all of the other in the towel and then her hands. His eyes too were closed; she could see from the relaxed tone of his face the pleasure her hands were giving him. He opened his eyes and looked at her, and then shifted so that he was next to her on the narrow bed. He leaned over and kissed her lips delicately and sweetly. Wendy felt swollen with want. She kissed him back, hoping he would satisfy her desire. She put her hands on his wet hair and held him closer, her fingers threading through his unruly brown wavy hair. He played with her limp, wet, still-curly locks, clustered around her head.
She moved away to take her shirt off. “I’m hot now.” He smiled at her and unbuttoned his white cotton shirt. It revealed a chest with more hair than she’d expected, curly and virile.
Noah got up to place both of their shirts over the shower rod in the bathroom. She looked across the room to see their clothes on the rod, their expanse of whiteness fluttering limply, like a bird beating its wings yet too frail to move its limbs high enough to fly.
Noah returned to his seat next to her on the bed and, with a new scrawny towel from the bathroom, began to towel her dry, starting with the crown of her head, carefully moving his hands in circles over her. Finished, he gave her a quick kiss on the top of the head. He continued his niggun all this time. Another time, Wendy might have found the humming annoying and pretentious, an act of spiritual showmanship, a sign to others: “Look at me see how spiritual I am.” Now, she felt like a child being cared for by a sensitive parent, gaining comfort after a difficult experience. “Mmmmm” came out of Wendy’s mouth spontaneously.
He toweled off her right arm, gave her shoulder a careful kiss, toweled her left arm, again letting her know with his mouth that he cherished each part of her. He reached to her back and rubbed the towel over her bra strap.
She could feel him bending closer to her, and he gave her another kiss on the top of her head. He moved delicately, first her forehead, then the tip of her nose, her mouth. After her chin, he paused.
“May I go lower?”
She didn’t want the magic soothing of the singing to end. She didn’t want to open her eyes, and murmured, “Please.” As he reached both hands around to unhook her bra in the back, he fumbled upon not finding the proper hardware in the expected place. “In front,” she said.
He quickly changed positions and found the way in. He removed her bra and lay it down on the bed. He kissed her chin and her collarbone, and then her cleavage. Wendy held his head in place and hugged it to her chest.
He fondled her rounded peach-sized breasts, kissing the tips of each and suckling them, first one and then the other. Her nipples were standing on end. She liked seeing his face at her breast and feeling his thick mop of hair against her chest.
“Your breasts . . . I want you, Wendy.”
“I want you, Noah.” Wendy pulled his head away from her breasts and looked at him full in the face as she said this. Then she kissed him, thrusting her tongue into his mouth, searching for and meeting his tongue, wanting to go as deep into him as she could, and then pulling her tongue out to caress his lips w
ith hers. His taste was both salty and sweet, a combination of what she had expected and what she hadn’t.
“I want to stay here, like this, and melt our warmth together. Will you be with me when I need you?” Noah queried, searching her eyes.
“I’ll be with you now.” She felt the throb of his penis against her thigh. “Something else you might need,” she said as she bent her face down to it, pulled down his sweatpants and underwear, and took him, fully in her mouth. Her mouth went up and down over the circumcised tip while she stroked the bottom half of the shaft with her hands.
“You’re so good,” Noah moaned, “Baby, keep going, don’t stop. Ohh . . .”
A minute later, he cried out, “I don’t know.”
She took her mouth off him, kept her hand around the shaft, and looked up at his face.
“I . . . I don’t know what I want. Is that okay?”
“You don’t want me?” She didn’t know how to react to him.
What was happening here? Had she done something wrong?
“No, you’re amazing.” He stopped, “I . . . I want you, but I just don’t know what else I want.”
She removed her hands from his cock and propped her head on her hand on her side in bed.
The relationship discussion. Wendy would have preferred just to continue the fondling, but Noah wanted to clarify things first. Wendy could be impulsive, doing what felt right, sorting it out later. It had gotten her in trouble in past relationships when things went too fast, too suddenly. But he wanted this; he invited her up.
Noah began, “I want to be glad to be alive, to feel all the emotions, to continue life. I would love to create new life now. To prove we are going forward, embracing life.” He looked at her and smiled, “The best revenge.”
“If things were simpler and we didn’t have to finish our degrees, and publish and get jobs and get tenure . . . if we could have a regular life without footnotes and analysis and thinking, and have a baby . . .”
She smiled at him. “We could pretend we’re trying to have a baby?” she added helpfully.
“If we had a baby and got married and lived in Jerusalem and proved Sam and Benj’s deaths weren’t in vain, would you be happy?” Noah’s grayblue eyes gazed at Wendy. He was training the whole of his attention carefully on her face, as he had so carefully dried her feet and kissed her nipples. It was a powerful gaze, his eyes on her, investigating, exposing.
“If you’re looking for someone to marry and have babies with and live here, I have lots of contacts among very lovely newly religious ladies. Not me.”
“I wish I could just get answers. Go to a rebbe and find out: Was Sam taken young because he already fulfilled his purpose?”
Wendy gazed back at Noah. “Life isn’t a group of mathematical problem sets that you work on and get totally confused by and go to the teacher and know he can give you the correct answer and teach you how to work it out. It’s never that precise—that there’s one answer, one clear and elegant way of working the solution like my high school physics teacher Dr. Stern used to tell us. There are some things you just have to figure out on your own. That’s why I’m writing a dissertation—I need to figure it out on my own. If you want pat answers, go to Yeshivat Temimei Nefesh; they specialize in personal guidance.”
“I wish I could have that simple faith,” he continued.
“If you had that faith you wouldn’t be allowed to be with me.”
“I wouldn’t trade it for being with you.”
“Good. You know, Noah . . .”
“What is it you want to figure out? Something I can help you with?
“If we’re done with the conversation, I’d say that’s possible. How about seeing how far you can take me?” Her clitoris was still throbbing, feeling like it took up the entirety of the space between her legs. She wanted to get to that point where her entire body was centered there, the tips of her fingers, the tips of her toes, and if she were stroked there she would feel it everywhere in her body, and finally explode in pleasure.
“Mmmm, I wonder. Interesting conundrum,” Noah said as he began again to put his mouth on her nipples.
“Yes, yes, now would you start with your fingers . . .”
Noah reached his hand down to her vagina and rubbed the outside of her underwear, gently and slowly, rhythmically, feeling her pubic bone underneath the flesh.
“Take it off. Touch me.”
Noah removed her panties with his hands while still leaning over to kiss her breasts.
Wendy moaned, “Rub my clit, please.”
“Don’t give me instructions. I know what I’m doing,” Noah said in mock annoyance as he bent down to graze her with his tongue.
“Oh, I want you. Noah . . . Noah, yes, oh . . .”
“Is that what you like?” he asked lifting his head from between her legs.
“Ohhh . . .” The sensations were beyond words, the pleasure coming over her in waves. “God, yes, yes, oh. Yeah . . .” Wendy had raised her head off the bed in ecstasy and suddenly flopped it back with a thump. “Do you . . . ?”
“Are you . . . ?”
“I’m not on the pill. My sponges are in my apartment.”
“I have some condoms. I wish we didn’t have to use them.”
“Hurry up, I want you.”
He walked over to the dresser and opened the top drawer. “Help me out first.”
He returned with a condom.
“Let me make sure you’ll fill it.”
She knelt on her haunches and placed her hands on his hipbones as he stood over the bed. She placed her mouth on his already erect cock and moved it up and down.
He moaned, “Oh . . . I’m ready.”
“I’m just getting started here, give me a chance.”
“I want to be inside you.”
Noah handed her the piece of coiled rubber in his hand. Wendy took it and tried to place it over him. It was sticking. “Vaseline?”
“Drawer of the night stand.” Wendy crawled over to the top edge of the bed and opened the drawer. She located the tub of Vaseline, scooted back quickly, and began to slather it on him. Now, she was able to fit the condom.
Noah lay down on the bed next to her and began kissing her, greedily, tonguing her, and holding her tight. Wendy was surprised at the intensity of his ardor.
She said, “I want you, Noah.”
He looked at her with the shaft of light in his gray-blue eyes focused on her, stiff like the rest of him.
“I’d love it if you were on top.”
He has ways he likes sex. He’s had sex and thought about it. I’m liking this more and more, perhaps even falling in love? It was the first time that thought had occurred to her.
Wendy mounted him—she couldn’t remember being in this position before. Had she? He said from underneath her, “Let me in?” and gave her an incredibly winning and radiant smile, the kind of smile a child gives a parent who he knows will indulge all whims because the parent finds the smile so endearing. She took his cock and gently slid it into her body, to absorb some of him into herself.
She liked being in this position, on top, controlling the motions and their frequency, looking down at Noah, his eyes closed. She didn’t generally view herself as particularly sexy. She didn’t associate herself with the type of tawdry clothes, hair, and nails that many women seemed to think was requisite to be thought of as sexy. From the little miniskirts to the acrylic nails with designs on them, Wendy had always found the preoccupations of women trying to be attractive to men trivial, shallow. Not that she didn’t want to be attractive. But she wanted to do it on her own terms, as a serious person who could be sexy for who she was, not just her looks—Susan Sontag-type sexy, where looks were only one part of the package.
She patted Noah’s curls and gazed down at him as she moved her haunches to her own rhythm. Usually men wanted to be on top to control everything, do all the work of motion. Here was a guy who got off on her control. Why? Just to lose control, or was he use
d to being with older women who taught him things? She too closed her eyes to better concentrate only on the physical sensations, block out the visual. Did someone teach her that? Or was it one of those things you just figure out for yourself?
Wendy felt with each breath that she needed to take in as much oxygen as possible, to remain alive. Enjoying each other’s bodies—she felt this would keep her alive, gasping at air she knew would sustain her. They both climaxed, quickly.
Wendy always enjoyed the aftermath of sex, the lying in bed, spent and pleasured, cuddling, with the knowledge of having been joined in ecstasy, the closeness still apparent. Neither of them said anything, but lay on the bed, with the covers over them, looking at each other, Wendy taking in Noah’s gray-blue eyes and delicate lips, Noah taking in Wendy’s deep brown eyes and thick curly dark brown hair, stroking her hair with care.
Finally, lying in silence got strained. Neither wanted to use mere language to break the spell their physical communication had engendered.
“That was . . . wow! Wendy, you’re . . .” Noah began.
Wendy did not want her mystic vision of gasping the air, of feeling sustained by him, to be dissolved by the banalities of speech. She said, “Shhh. No talking. Just be.” She rolled closer to him and put her head on his shoulder. He put his arm around her, and she kissed his cheek and said his name: “Noah.”
He said hers: “Wendy.” She didn’t reply. “Wendy, I think I’m falling in love.”
She murmured, “Shhhh . . .”
Wendy called Orly the next day. “Orly, this is a crazy country. Death can get you laid! Noah and I . . .”
Orly laughed uncontrollably, “Seinfeld had prison furlough sex, and Israel has the post-pigua shag. How was he?”
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