Intimacy

Intimacy

It doesn’t matter how I found out. The point is that I wasn’t looking for anything. It just came out. You live with a man for twenty-seven years, more than half of your life, and it doesn’t occur to you to look for anything. And then one day, one afternoon to be precise, completely by accident, you find out.

All the cliches are true. It’s like a kick in the gut. You can’t talk, you can’t breathe. I was in my sons’ room and I collapsed onto the floor. And I had no thoughts except that the world was not what I believed it was, as if everything I’d known until that moment meant nothing. If he lied to me, then anything could be a lie, anything that I supposedly knew.

That’s what it’s like right after the kick. Shock. And the person that’s supposed to be your best friend, the one you believe in like you believe in yourself, he’s the one who… And it feels like there’s no point in getting up, because what’s the point if there’s nothing you can know, nothing you can trust… Not even yourself.

All these years I thought we were beyond things like this. I didn’t even think that we were above them. I simply didn’t think. Now I understand how stupid I was. But I also didn’t want to be attentive. A world without trust didn’t seem worth living in.

Him? He was horrified. There’s no other word. It was Thursday. Luckily we had the weekend. For two days neither of us had to go to work, but even afterward, when we had to leave the house, I’d come back from school and go straight into the boys’ room. I’d go there, and he’d stand in the doorway and talk to me. At first, I barely answered him. I couldn’t. Later, at some point, he felt like he could enter and sit on the bed. As he sat there he would sometimes repeat the same sentences he’d already said, but much of the time he just sat there silently. With his hands on his head. Once, in the middle of the night, he made some soup, tomato soup, and tried to convince me to eat. For the first time in my life, I was glad the boys were abroad. I didn’t want them to come back. I felt like I couldn’t bear it.

I don’t know how other couples survive things like this. I’ve seen movies, I’ve heard stories, but hearing about it is something else. Hearing isn’t knowing. We made a vow. What didn’t we go through together? And suddenly it turns out that the vow is a lie. For eight months he desecrated our vow. That’s not something you can call a misstep. In a flash everything seemed tainted to me. Desecrated. I couldn’t stand the thought of him touching me.

The things he said…he’s sorry, and sorry, and sorry. If only he could erase those months.

He said the whole affair had been a distortion of his real life, his real self.

He said that if there’d just been a way to undo what he’d done—he’d walk barefoot to the end of the world to do it. And he kept repeating that he understood I’d never forget.

Everything he said sounded shallow and superficial. Trivial cliches, like in a movie. I felt like all this talk had nothing to do with me. Like the person who was speaking was a complete stranger.

At some point I also felt sorry for him. But like you feel sorry for someone pathetic. I didn’t pity him, I just felt sorry, without any warmth. I didn’t feel connected at all. I didn’t want to comfort him. I saw him totally flat. The things he said sounded pathetic, and he himself looked pathetic, like a kid who turns in an assignment that’s all copy-paste.

At some point, somehow, I managed to tell him that I didn’t understand what he was saying. That these were just words. That there were probably millions of people in the world who made exactly the same declarations. I’d thought I knew him, who he was, and it turned out that I didn’t know anything. I couldn’t even begin to understand what he was saying. Other than admitting his guilt, he didn’t actually tell me anything.

He asked me what I wanted to know. He didn’t see the point of getting into the details, but if I felt that it would help even a little…

I didn’t feel that it would help—meaning, I couldn’t promise him that anything in the world could save us—but at least it was a thread to hold onto. So he tried to tell me a little more, beyond what I’d already discovered.

Even without seeing his face—I was lying on the rug, I needed something solid beneath me, and he was sitting down—even without seeing him, I understood that it was hard for him. How could it not be? He was afraid to hurt me any more, and he was afraid for himself, afraid of how I would react. That was also terrible—feeling how scared he was of me, the man with whom I…

So, somehow, he added a few more details. Chapter titles. The conference in Haifa, that was where he’d met her. Though she was just an assistant, they’d let her attend, and from the first moment he’d seen that she was interested. It’s idiotic, but like an idiot he’d been flattered. He knew it wasn’t an excuse, but maybe he was going through a midlife crisis and needed to go to therapy or something. The physical contact, it started then, in Haifa, at the hotel. And it continued from there. How? A few phone calls, text messages, emails. How often? It depended… Twice he’d gone to visit her up north, but the north is far. A couple of times she’d come here to the city. Yes, a hotel. No, not always the same one. Two. Actually, there’d been a third, but not in the city. He didn’t understand himself, how he got swept up. Maybe he really did need a psychologist. About one thing he was sure: it hadn’t been love. From the very beginning he’d made this clear to her, that there was no way he would let it harm our family. From the very beginning he’d made it clear, except that at some point things had gotten complicated, and she’d wanted more. What? What you might guess…

Anyway, he’d cut things off. On the spot. He’d told her that what she wanted would never happen and that it was totally disconnected from reality. That’s what he’d explained to her and then he’d cut off contact. But then later there’d been, how to put it, a regression. And this regression he really didn’t understand, because after he’d cut things off, he’d actually been relieved. Not just a little relieved, very relieved.

So what did I think now? He wanted to know what I thought after he’d supposedly told me everything, and I had no idea since he actually hadn’t told me anything. This so-called story, these embarrassing chapter titles, it sounded like television babble, and it was insulting.

I told him that he was insulting me, and both of us, and everything that I’d ever believed we had. And he said: “Help me. I know I have no right, but please explain to me what you want.”

What did I want? I’d already seen her picture. As soon as I found out I did a search on her. So I wanted all the obvious things: for her to suffer, for her to get that disgusting smile off her face, for her teeth, those donkey teeth, to break into pieces… If everything was going to be destroyed, then she should be destroyed before anything else.

That’s what I wanted, instinctively, but these wishes were more in the background, because what flooded me was those chapter titles—those empty titles that came from his lips. At some point they’d cut off contact. When? At what stage? Had he really initiated it? And if so, what exactly had he told her? What words had he used exactly? And what exactly had he called me? Had he used my name? Had he said it? Or maybe he’d said “my wife”? “Spouse”? “Partner”? “She”? He hadn’t said “my wife”? He’d packaged me up in general terms like “family” and “home life”? And all this, the whole conversation he’d had with her, where had it even happened? On the phone while driving? Face to face? Where? Where had that face been?

I told him I had to know the whole truth. He was still afraid, but he also tried to claim that what he’d told me was the truth.

The truth? What kind of truth? For years we’d been connected, for years we’d told each other everything: where we were, what we went through, what we said, what was said to us.

Always, always, right from the day we’d met, everything had been open between us: not just the big things, like memories or fantasies, but also the so-called small things. You know, his father’s terrible jokes, his boss’ disgusting aftershave, his bunion…we talked about everything. Otherwise, what possible significance is there to intimacy? People can talk to you generally about all kinds of beautiful ideas that they have, about their souls, but if, at the same time, their shoes are rubbing against their feet…

Eight months. Eight! I felt worse than stupid. Like I wasn’t fit for life. That difficult year we’d spent in Hong Kong, where we didn’t know anyone, even there I hadn’t felt so out of place.

One thing I’m grateful for, and that’s that, even within that despair, I wasn’t completely desperate. I mean that somehow, despite the feeling that I couldn’t know anything, my need to understand didn’t completely die. Until he put his “summary” into words, this need seemed to die. But as soon as he started, all these questions started popping up. Not all at once. At first, I remember, my brain got stuck on the period he called the “regression.” They’d broken up. And gotten back together. They hadn’t stayed separated. How long had their split lasted? Who’d taken the first step to get back together? Did he miss the sex? Did he miss her? This person who I knew was incapable of sex without emotion.

So the questions started appearing, and he answered. The regression had taken place on a holiday eve, Rosh Hashanah, on the morning before the holiday. She’d sent him an email. Wished him things. As someone who’d quit smoking, he should have known better… Was he addicted to her? In the destructive sense, yes. That’s how he’d felt. No doubt there had been a destructive urge. And the email? He’d deleted it. He’d deleted all her emails. All of them? He thought so. And his reply? Well, as far as he could remember, he’d answered with a text message.

As far as he could remember… My instinct told me that he actually did remember. How could he not remember the cigarette that had gotten him smoking again? But also, even more than that, thanks to the same sense, I suddenly knew something else: I was sure that he hadn’t deleted that text message. So from within all that despair, in the middle of all that, it somehow felt good to be sure of something.

I asked him to show it to me. Obviously, he tried to avoid it. Now we’re going to look for a message from so many months ago? That’s what’s important now? Yes, that’s what’s important to me. That holiday eve we’d been at my parents’ place, we’d spoken with the boys on the phone, we’d gone to bed. We’d spoken with one of them again from bed. A whole evening, the entire holiday, we’d been together, we… He’d done things with me, he’d also gone up and organized the attic, that I remembered, and all that time, in his head… Or maybe, actually, quite possibly, they’d already decided that morning where and when exactly to continue the regression.

Only a few days later did I understand that this was a decisive moment for us. I didn’t get the significance at that moment. Everything was still raw, and what I told him, the request I made, it came straight from the gut. It’s actually pretty simple. If you ask someone for a key, it means you believe in the possibility of opening something up…

In retrospect I think that he, too, unconsciously understood that if he wanted to save what we had, he had to give me a key.

It took him a moment, and when he offered me his phone, he let out a kind of sigh that I’d never heard in my life. A lot of air came out of him, slowly, quietly.

Now I’m getting to the embarrassing part. Everything about this story is difficult, but certain parts are…shameful. Because shame is what I felt when I saw his text message. My intuition was right. He’d saved it. There were other messages that he hadn’t deleted, but this one, the regression text, what was written there, what he’d written—it was ridiculous. And shameful, yes, shameful. Shameful for the man that I thought I knew.

What was written there was a quote. A line from an English nursery rhyme, despite his English not being so great. What he’d sent her was: “Pussycat, pussycat, where have you been?”

Just like that. And obviously I’m aware of the sexual overtones. But where had he gotten this English nursery rhyme all of a sudden? What kind of person sends a cheap one-liner like that? Not the man that I knew. The man I knew had good taste.

That’s one part of what happened. The other part is that I was embarrassed for him. And I saw he was also embarrassed, so much so that he didn’t want me to look at him. And if he too understood that this was an embarrassing text message, then perhaps I was not, in the end, sitting with a stranger. I didn’t know, but I told him that I also wanted to see his email. Maybe he hadn’t deleted everything there either.

It’s interesting, I think, that he didn’t delete everything. I wonder what that means. It’s obvious to me that he hadn’t considered the possibility that I would read these things. I mean, the way he knew me, the way our relationship was until then, there was no reason to imagine a situation in which I’d be poking around. It’s disgraceful. Even now, poking around seems disgraceful to me…if he hadn’t himself given me the key, I would have never gone inside. And he knew that was the case, and yet he’d deleted. But he’d also left himself a few as souvenirs. Why save something you’re embarrassed about? Such cheap text messages? That’s another thing I didn’t understand.

I told him that, and he said that he didn’t understand either. I also didn’t understand how there was any air left in his lungs. But there was because he let out another long sigh.

Nothing else happened between us that night. Nothing happened for another couple of days, or over the weekend. He went to work, I went to work. He had his thoughts and I had mine. Though for me, over those next few days, the thoughts became more and more detailed. I started to think about all the things I still didn’t know, I started imagining them in a very detailed way. And every moment that I wasn’t standing chalk-in-hand before the classroom—I was inside this whole thing.

Not understanding anything is terrible. But there’s something that’s even more terrible—and that’s accepting that you’re never, ever, even with the person closest to you, really safe. This scared me more than the specific devastation itself, beyond our specific union that seemed to suddenly have been erased. It’s like someone had suddenly told me that one of my boys was a murderer. Like someone with a devious, cynical smile had told me: Don’t believe anything, anything can happen, anything.

And it was this exact thing, this cynicism, that made me realize that I wasn’t going to accept anything, because this cynicism was, to me, itself the most devastating thing. Because even if, say, I left him, my sense of security in the world would be destroyed. And with insecurity like that—with this thought that anyone could be a murderer—I couldn’t live with such despair.

At this point my soul was still in extreme turmoil, and still, despite all these emotions, by the end of the week this understanding ripened inside me. And early on Friday morning, really early, as soon as I heard the coffeemaker in the kitchen, I came out and asked him whether he wanted to go away with me for the weekend. Just like that.

Only once we were outside of the city did he ask me where we were going—that’s how much I’d surprised him and that’s how excited he was. And when I answered “Haifa,” I could see even from out of the corner of my eye that he didn’t get it. “Haifa, really?” “Really.” “Fine, then Haifa’s where I want to go too.” Not until I turned onto the street of the hotel did he understand—and even there I had to explain to him. If this was where they had started, then this was where we were going to start too.

Have you ever thought about the names that they give conference halls? Any hotel you go into, there’s always a Fig Room, and a Date Room, and an Olive Room. Always the same. Their conference had been in the Fig Room. When we went in it was light in the hall, and outside, by the door, two of the hotel staff were clearing away the coffee stand. I asked him where he’d sat and where she’d sat. I asked at which point they’d started talking to each other, and whether it had been during one of the lectures, or during a coffee break. I wasn’t angry. From the moment we entered I somehow felt only curiosity. But he was pretty shocked. It looked like his hands and feet, his whole body, where somehow getting all confused. At first, he tried to tell me that he didn’t remember. He even joked, saying that men don’t remember details like that, but after a few questions it was clear to us both that he remembered very well. It had started during a coffee break. He’d had coffee. His regular. She’d had mint tea—just leaves, no teabag. When they went back into the hall, they moved to the last row, and, no, neither one of them had been sitting there before.

Following me to sit down in those same seats, collapsing next to me, he looked like he was about to start crying. I was sorry that he misunderstood me, and I told him that I didn’t want him to be sad, that had certainly not been my intention.

So what was my intention? He was so despondent that instinctively, without thinking, I touched his cheek. That is, I put my hand there. I explained to him that my only intention was to understand. I don’t know whether, as the cliche goes, “understanding is forgiving.” I had no idea. So for now I was just trying to clarify things, and to clarify them from the beginning.

He perked up a little. But he still didn’t really get me. Because after one of the hotel staff came in to apologize and say that she was going to turn off the lights, and I took him up to reception and asked him what the room number had been, I saw a little spark light up in his eye…that well-known spark. Yes, that.

He said I was crazy, but his voice somehow livened up, like he was excited about some kind of crazy surprise. I’ll admit that I didn’t like that smile. It showed me how far apart we’d grown. If this was the degree to which he didn’t understand…the very thought that he thought that I was having that thought…that under these circumstances I could want…

I didn’t like it at all. This unfamiliarity. It made me sad. But this unfeeling I had, in a strange way, made me more patient. It seemed that I, too, didn’t altogether know him. And if you really want to get to know someone, there are no shortcuts.

The room they gave us wasn’t the same room, but at least it was on the right floor. We got a small balcony facing the sea, and that wasn’t right either, because the room they’d given him during the conference faced the parking lot. Her room had been on a different floor, he honestly didn’t remember which, and anyway he’d invited her to his. It had been after the last lecture of the day, not right away, first they’d had a beer downstairs. He’d also walked her to her car to get a book. The physical thing started in the car. It had just started raining. He went in for cover.

Sudden autumn rainfall is romantic. The autumn sea is also romantic. But they had not, as mentioned, had a view of the sea.

Romantic, not romantic—you would’ve thought that they’d have gone to her room, that he’d have walked her there, and then come in for just a moment. Maybe she’s the type who unloads her entire suitcase onto the bed, and a pile of clothes on the bed isn’t romantic. He is, after all, a pretty tidy person. Over the years, he’s become more and more so…

Where am I? I was talking about being tidy, and I’m talking all over the place. So I’m with him. I was with him, in the not-exactly-right room, and we’re together. When we got there, we still had a couple of hours of light. When he’d walked in with her, it had been night, so the time wasn’t right either.

In the morning, when the cleaning woman was making her rounds, I did manage to look into one of the rooms facing the other direction. What can I say? It was a room. Totally regular. Maybe in the dark, with the rain falling and the smell of dampness outside…maybe that was enough to create a romantic atmosphere.

I think there’s always the issue of the setting. If you want to understand something, it might be important to also understand the influence of the view.

At first, when we’d just gotten there, I thought that maybe I’d hang around with him downstairs until the time that they’d gone up to the room together. But that was too hard. There were too many hours to kill, and also he still didn’t get me. On the way up I tried to ask him what they’d talked about at first, but his answers were very general. They’d talked about the lecturers at the conference, then they somehow got to talking about life. What does it mean to talk “about life”? The book that she’d forgotten in her car was also “about life.”

This shallow book is also a story of its own, a whole story, but I won’t get into that now. To keep it short, we didn’t hang around downstairs, and we also didn’t go out to get any food or have a drink. I took the key, we went up, and on the way, he kept looking at me with that expression that I didn’t exactly like.

At that point I still had no idea how we were going to continue or what I was going to do with him. But what I wasn’t going to do with him was completely clear to me. And after we closed the door, he, too, finally got it.

“So what do we do now?” “I don’t know. Maybe we talk? Maybe we try?”

He didn’t dare get mad at me, but he did ask me whether we really had to continue this whole investigation right here. And he also said something about a dog that pees in the house and gets its face pushed into the urine.

It was unpleasant, to say the least. And still, despite the hostility and resistance, despite it looking like there was no chance for communication, something optimistic opened up. Opened, withdrew, returned, advanced a little…

We sat on the armchairs. At some point we wandered onto the balcony. Then, after wandering back in, past midnight, he slipped from the armchair to the floor. We had a kind of marathon and the most exhausting part was actually the breaks, the long breaks of silence. At certain moments I had the feeling that it was all falling apart—I, he, each of us with our own body. But no, it didn’t happen. We didn’t fall apart, and neither of us ran away.

They didn’t have a minibar. By the time we called to order, room service had already ended, and about a third of the way into the marathon he asked whether I’d be offended if he ordered a pizza. With her, by the way, he’d never ordered pizza. Not that night, when they’d first had dinner, and not another time, when they’d spent an afternoon together.

But I’m skipping again. We only discussed the topic of eating together weeks later. Clearly I was curious about it—did they eat together, didn’t they eat together, and what did it mean—but I knew that you couldn’t talk about everything at once. At the time he just asked me about pizza, and I obviously told him that it was fine. I wasn’t there to starve him to death.

I felt like that was a good moment. A real moment of rest, not like the breaks of silence. We both smiled, and for a moment this was the man that I knew, the one who, sitting with me in the delivery room, had eaten an entire bag of pretzels.

I didn’t want him to feel tortured. Even though speaking about it was painful, I needed to know, but I definitely didn’t want to torture him.

Like I said, I didn’t have a plan, but intuitively I understood that in order to make sure that we didn’t crash land, I had to restrain my questions and go slowly. I told him that if we were here, where the story had started, then we’d focus on the beginning of the story, that he would only tell me about that. And he asked, “Why would we want to cause ourselves more pain?”

That’s what he asked, but it was also obvious that he knew the answer, that sometimes healing can hurt.

I said to him: “Pretend there had been a camera, a security camera that recorded the two of you here. And pretend you had the recording. Would you let me see it?”

And, at first, he answered that it was a crazy question. He didn’t know what to tell me.

So he wouldn’t have shown me the recording? Why not?

It took him an hour or so to consider that question. It helped me when I finally understood—when he explained to me—that he was embarrassed, that is, that he would be embarrassed for me to see it. If he could have erased himself from the recording and just shown her—then, yes, he would have let me watch, if it was really important to me. Because, yes, I’m more important to him than anything else.

After I understood this, part of the weight that I’d felt seemed to fall away. People who are connected to each other, people whose intimacy is real, can’t have any shame between them. And I knew that in order for us to stay together I had to see him as he was, without him hiding anything. I explained this to him, and I also explained to him the thought I’d had in the meantime: if he’d had a recording to give me, the whole thing might have been simpler. After a few hours of watching, as unnerving as it’d be, I would’ve gotten some answers. But because we didn’t have a recording, there was only one way for him to make it possible for me to know, and that was to tell me in words.

This was the point, I think, at which we really got going. We sailed. It wasn’t easy sailing. We hit all kinds of low tides, there were also storms, and plenty of going around in circles. But we still sailed. And despite everything, he tried to tell me the story. I mean real things: movements, words, what had led to what exactly, what they’d done first and what later.

The details were terrible, just as expected. Tortuous for him to tell, and obviously tortuous for me to hear… It really might have been easier to watch the whole thing recorded, though that thought is also chilling. Several times he disappeared on me, and I kept having to force myself to ask. Because I knew that I had to be done with it, done so that no other question would pop up later.

I used to believe that if a man made love to you with his eyes open, it meant something. Today I know that I was naive about that too. A man can look at you and see another woman, so even if he doesn’t shut his eyes for a single second, it doesn’t mean anything.

He swore that it wasn’t like that. He swore that each time he’d been with me, it had been just with me, but it’s hard for me to believe this… Even when we spoke with complete honesty. Anyway, I had to know what he’d seen, and, more importantly, what he saw now. I mean, the images were engraved in his mind, and even if they didn’t see each other anymore, in his mind’s eye he could still see.

So he told me everything, whatever happened, from the moment he brought her into the room. Even after what had happened between them in the car, they still needed an excuse for her to go in with him. Some kind of file that he was supposed to transfer onto her computer. Isn’t it interesting that after they’d already started, he still needed an excuse? I think it says something. The only question is what does it say. He claimed that he’d been ambivalent, and that he’d left himself the option to just transfer the file for her. Maybe that’s true.

Anyway, the details. It was like pouring alcohol on an open wound. Like something that burns, something you need in order to clean the wound. And it took time. What had happened between them the next morning during breakfast downstairs—we left for the morning. But even with our being so focused, just getting to the point when she’d slipped back into her own room took us until three o’clock, and we were both exhausted. His voice was so worn out it was shaking, and I was shaking too.

In the end I lay down on the bed, but without pulling back the covers. When he’d been with her, he’d pulled them back. But I didn’t. And I also kept my clothes on. I didn’t even take off my bra.

He asked whether he could lie down next to me, and before we fell asleep for a while, he said we were both crazy. He’d been saying that since we’d first started coming back together, that is, from the moment we’d walked into the hotel.

We slept for about four hours, and in the morning we continued with what we’d left for the next day—and, to keep it short, I’ll just say that by then we were already on track for real self-exposure. Being on track is supposed to make things easier, but in the light of day, with the sunlight that fell directly on our table, and with all the people walking by to fill their glasses with juice, everything appeared even crazier.

While we were drinking coffee, he said there was probably not another couple in the world that was capable of this kind of openness and honesty.

We were both half-conscious from exhaustion—my face was puffy and his was unshaven—the kind of exhaustion you feel after climbing a mountain. I saw that he felt this too, that we’d climbed a mountain together. I saw that he understood how important our effort was. But there was still one thing he didn’t get. And I only realized it when we got into the car.

Without it being said, it was clear that he would drive us back. I could see that he liked that. When we drove long distances he was almost always at the wheel, so he liked being back in that role.

We left the parking lot, left the street with the hotels, and as the car descended the mountain he sighed. What was he thinking? Well, he had no words for the experience we’d gone through, but he was glad we’d gone through it and it was now behind us. What was “it”? Everything that’d happened, everything he’d done. He was lucky to have a smart wife life me, grateful for my being insistent with him. And just because I was so insistent, we were now able to forget the whole affair. It was amazing to him that we could go back to being ourselves, back to what we’d always had between us, and maybe even more. Amazing that, from here, we could continue with a clean slate.

Clean?

What, weren’t we clean? So then what…

No matter how much he understood, he wasn’t really connecting, and I still had to explain myself to him. For eight months we’d lived a lie. We’d managed to clarify the beginning of his lie—the first twenty-four hours. We could truly put these twenty-four hours behind us. But everything that came afterward? Were we supposed to lie? Were we supposed to pretend and stay silent? Our relationship had never been like that—and that was not the kind of relationship I wanted.

He said: But I thought you were willing to forget about what I did…

And I answered that, in principle, I was possibly willing, but that in order to forget I first had to know.

He had to understand that, without knowing, there was no way I could forget. I just couldn’t.

He wanted to know what would happen to us, and I told him that it depended. I mean, I wasn’t a prophet. I reminded him that it had taken us twenty-four hours to clarify twenty-four hours. It had been like being in a hot sauna, and yes, afterward I felt like I could erase those twenty-four hours. But then what? Forget the rest of his story? All their secret phone calls? Whatever he’d had in his head when we’d gone to London? The text messages that he had or hadn’t sent her? The place of “pussycat, pussycat” within the story?

I didn’t know how much strength I had to withstand another hot sauna. I wasn’t sure how much strength he had. And to cover, from top to bottom, a story spanning eight months—I told him I didn’t know if it was even possible, or how long it could take.

He asked me whether I was serious… And I told him that, yes, I was serious. Together means together, and for me, there was no sense in “together” if it meant living a dirty life.

We talked about this all the way home, and various times, I thought, he was looking for me to give him a break.

I didn’t give him any breaks. I didn’t give either one of us a break. And the most amazing thing is that we really did speak openly. At some point, I told him that his body still felt dirty to me. It was terrible, I knew that, but if people are truly connected, then they don’t pretend.

There were lots of cars on the highway. Later we got into a traffic jam. But it actually worked in our favor. Because we were going so slowly, there was no way he was going to lose his concentration at the wheel, and by the time we got home we knew what was right for us—we even had the makings of a plan.

From today’s perspective, I’m proud of us. I think we have reason to be proud. I’m sure that there aren’t many couples that are capable of this level of intimacy, and we’re still going deeper.

We didn’t know how long the whole thing would take. Covering eight months takes a lot more than eight months, considering we do most of the work on the weekends—and even then, we have to take breaks, because there’s still real life.

At this point we’re getting close to their breakup. We’re not there yet, but we’re getting close.

There are moments when he still gets stuck, speaking about it is hard for him, and he tries to get around it.

And there are moments when I need to know something so much that I ask him to skip ahead in the timeline. What do I need to know? General questions. Presents—that suddenly popped up for me. Were there presents? And holidays—what happened then? And birthdays—my birthday also fell within that time period, and he celebrated it with me. Or our boys, or his promotion—did he talk to her about things like that? And his sudden interest in vegetarianism—where did that come from? And Bob Marley and reggae in general?

As soon as you start skipping around the story, you drown, and if we drown, it’ll be our end. So I try very hard to make sure we don’t skip. And sometimes, when I can’t keep myself from asking, he helps me stay on track.

We know that only if we progress chapter by chapter will we be able to cope with this story. And that’s what we’ve been doing for nearly a year. There are no more shallow generalities like “regression.” We approach a chapter, work to understand all the details—what actually happened—and only then do we leave it behind.

Some parts of the story demand weeks, sometimes it’s an outright battle, but it’s clear to us that if we hide or cover up even the smallest thing, then it’s as if we hadn’t done anything.

We feel like it’s worth fighting for our intimacy. And we’re proud of fighting this way.

It’s not that things have returned to what they were. That’s still far off. We’ve started sleeping in bed together, and this closeness is a good thing. His body no longer looks as impure as it did at first, which is certainly a good sign, though there’s no sex in the full sense. And, no, this doesn’t get in the way.

As far as I’m concerned, we could return to it, and actually, we tried, but the attempt wasn’t successful.

He says his body is punishing him for hurting me. We think that’s the explanation. And we believe that after we move a little further in the story, and leave more parts behind us, the problem will resolve itself. It bothers him more, but that’s just because he’s a man.

In general, it seems to us both that we’re on the way, and already, when my head is on his chest and I hear his heartbeat, I know what’s in his heart.

There is, obviously, sadness. Sometimes, after putting a chapter behind us, he buries his head in my chest like a child—then, especially, we feel the sadness.

But the main thing is that we’re close again, that we’re slowly getting back to being like a single body. Because for us, yes, for us that’s what’s most important.

“Intimiyut” from Anashim To’im. Jerusalem: Achuzat Bayit, 2016.

Image by Antonio Carrau.