The Dream (Israel)
The Dream (Israel)
I can barely admit I have this dream, it flutters around my head like a bad hairdo, but sometimes I still dream about my first boyfriend. The skinny one, with the black hair and lurking stubble, whose eyebrows grew together to a shameless V in the center of his forehead. He'd come home from college for the weekend to his family's big, new house, and we'd sit on the bare floor, socked, playing board games on interminable Sabbath afternoons. More rarely we'd kiss in his white-walled room behind the paper shades, the red and green of brick and oak peeping through. The sounds of his family echoed in the massive house, reminding us constantly of our sins. But the dream takes place long after he dropped out of engineering school and moved to Jerusalem; it takes place even after the second boyfriend, the one with big, tremulous lips and a grey Toyota Avalon; it takes place far from the orange circle of streetlight on New Bridge Road where the groundhogs come to die, and where we'd park sometimes until four in the morning; far from the laundry-detergent smell that clung to both of them when I pressed my nose into their shirts, the clean, full, wholesome smell of love...
The dream takes place in a strange Israel, scrubbed of its Semitic grime, the Arabic and Hebrew patter faded into a dull audio treacle. I walk, not naked, not clothed, through the narrow streets leading to the Wailing Wall and the excavation sites with their half-eroded pillars--pillars without roofs, lifting into the perfect sky like bodiless legs. I begin to descend toward the Wall, past the stone bones of ancient towns hidden behind fences. Joy floods my body with each downward step. I float through the metal detectors, past the bent women lifting their keys from the bins. After I pass them, I see him, the first boyfriend, dressed in the Sabbath suit I saw him in last before he left. He comes to walk beside me, clutches me, and as I feel again the minute weight of his thin hot arm I am drawn back to the place where everything that happens has real consequence.
We walk through the Wall's courtyard together. The flat stones hum and warm beneath my feet. I know that I'm sleeping--even in the dream my limbs are heavy--but the light on me is shining harshly, and my legs are round and brown. His eyes are the same color they were on the rainy day of my first terrible and disappointing kiss and subsequent blazing discoveries.
The me that's hovering just under my shut eyelids knows he left me long ago, knows, even, that he's gotten married in the interim, but the brown me in the dream knows nothing at all. She can see his white throat, octagonal glasses, thin fingers--he's narrow all through-- and can feel his wiry arm around her. The warm Jerusalem wind carries the breath of her love in it. She knows him; and his smell; and the other him; and his same smell; and the trembling wet texture of lip on lip. She knows her love will never wane. It's big in their interlocked hands. It's buried in the white ground of dream-Israel, where it will always exist.