Rhyming Life and Death by Amos Oz Page A

aware of its absence.
    A mischievous little imp scampers into his thoughts and points out to him that now they are quits: she has been taking care all along not to press her breasts against you, so that you won’t notice how small they are, while now you are withdrawing your loins from her for more or less the same reason.
    Should he whisper to her what the imp just told him? They could enjoy a liberating laugh together, which will relieve their anxieties and they will be left with no more worries or guilty secrets, nothing ridiculous or awkward, and then they can really start enjoying themselves.
    But instead he hastens to silence the little gremlin and say nothing. Instead of whispering a comparison that is no comparison at all he starts kissing her shoulders, her flank, tactfully skirting her breasts but stooping to nibble at her tummy, and on the way, between kisses, he gives her a few skilful caresses that draw out from deep inside her a soft gurgling sound, like a low, long-drawn-out cooing.
    While he caresses Rochele he closes his eyes tight and tries to recover lost ground by visualising the outline of Ricky’s underwear, the asymmetric line of her knickers that was visible through her short skirt and caused him so much excitement earlier in the evening, before the literary event. He forces himself to imagine Ricky lifting her skirt up to her hips for him with one hand while slipping the other into her knickers and pulling them open at the crotch. And he also conjures up detailed pictures ofwhat must have taken place in the hotel room in Eilat between this same Ricky and her footballer lover, Charlie, or between Charlie and Lucy, runner-up in the Queen of the Waves contest, in the same room in the same hotel, or what might have taken place between Charlie and the two girls together, or between Ricky and Lucy in bed together on their own, without Charlie.
    And when none of this helps him, he asks his imagination to transform him for a few minutes into Yuval, the young poet who hungers so much for a woman’s body day and night that he despises his own life: so now you are Yuval, and at last you’ve been given a nearly naked woman’s body, take it, do what you like with it, strip off her nightie and quench all your feverish thirst.
    *
    Rochele notices, or maybe she just guesses, his alternating pride and humiliation. Burying her face in the cavity of his shoulder she says in her innermost voice: Tell me that you’re really here? Come on, convince me that it’s not all happening in a dream?
    Maybe it is because she believes it is all happeningin a dream that she does not stop his hand when it raises the hem of her nightdress above her hips. Not only does she not stop him, she takes his hand and guides it to another texture that feels finer and far silkier than that of her nightdress, a warm texture that discloses hints of folds and moist recesses to his touch, until he swells once more and has no need of poor Yuval or Ricky the waitress or the outline of her knickers under her skirt. Almost in an instant his desire rises to a level where the pressure to reach a climax stalls and gives way to a sort of sensitive physical alertness, pleased with its own sexual generosity, that gets a kick out of giving her thrill after thrill and postponing his own satisfaction, feeling to see how he can give her more and more pleasure, until she cannot take any more. And so, in complete self-denial – in every sense – with his fingers, now experienced and even inspired, he starts to steer her enjoyment like a ship towards its home port, to the deepest anchorage, right to the core of her pleasure.
    Attentive to the very faintest of signals, like some piece of sonar equipment that can detect sounds in the deep imperceptible to the human ear, he registersthe flow of tiny moans that rise from inside her as he continues to excite her, receiving and unconsciously classifying the fine nuances that differentiate