and all the other good people at Etruscan Press, who bravely fight on against the combined forces of conglomerate publishing, the bullying homogenization of taste, the relentless noise of self-promotion, and the many other deeply mixed blessings the twenty-first century has brought to those who love, and try to create, literature. And thanks, also, to my friend Jim Elkins for his expert proofreading and equally expert editorial advice.
THE GREATEST JEWISH AMERICAN LOVER
IN HUNGARIAN HISTORY
MICHAEL BLUMENTHAL
The boy, hardly nineteen, was the son of a famous Israeli sculptor David Yogev and his beautiful, much younger, wife Sarah. He was a beautiful young man as well, and, what’s more, intelligent and athletic in the bargain, possessed of the kind of calm and reticence even very few adult men could pride themselves on. So it was no wonder that older women—particularly those afflicted with unhappy marriages or sexually disinterested husbands—took an interest in him.
It was no wonder, also, that Daphna Feuerstein, who had seduced his far shyer and less attractive older brother, Etan, several months earlier, would begin to show an interest in him as well. The two boys’ bedrooms in their parents’ Tel Aviv apartment on En Harod Street were only inches apart and the temptation for an attractive woman of thirty-five to parade around in various states of undress in front of two hardly post-adolescent young men was simply too great to resist.
He had had girlfriends before—too many for a boy his age, some family friends insisted—but his father had been a young man of notoriously varied romantic experience, so it was no surprise that the branch hadn’t fallen far from the tree. His older brother, Etan, had also inherited a great deal from his father. But in his case it was the sensitive and artistic (and, insofar as the details of the quotidian life were concerned, mostly dysfunctional) side. Already a published poet and accomplished watercolor painter by his twentieth birthday, the young man was possessed of a radically otherworldly air, complete with a state of physical dishevelment and untidiness that made him far less attractive to women than his popular and exceedingly well-adjusted brother—skier and windsurfer par excellence, star student, budding veterinarian, and already what the American rock and roll legend Elvis Presley might have called a hunk a hunk of burning love.
Daphna Feuerstein had been Etan’s first lover, and it rendered matters no less untidy within the Yogev family that, in addition to being the mother of three young children, she was also David Yogev’s best friend’s daughter. She was also nearly fifteen years older than the young virgin she had so eagerly taken to bed, and nearly seventeen years older than his younger brother, to whom, she liked to think, she would have far less to teach.
Whatever it was she had, or didn’t have, to teach young Simon Yogev, she figured, she would have plenty of time to find out. She planned on this being a long relationship—far longer, at least, than the one with his brother Etan had been. As she saw it, it had more potential. She loved the scent of Simon’s body, the taste of his semen, she loved the soft furry hair on his legs and his lithe, muscular chest, and, perhaps above all, she loved the tight black curls on his head, loved running her fingers through them when they made love, and loved, even, the silence with which he responded to her forceful vocal demonstrations of ecstasy and pleasure.
Her estranged husband, Hanan, was an artistic and attractive man too—and had gradually become rich in the bargain. When they first met at a Tel Aviv nightclub, he had been a struggling jazz musician, a man who had an easy way with women and a difficult time paying the bills. Then, once their first son was born, he had decided that the combined life of a struggling artist and a family man wasn’t for him, and, spotting a void in Tel Aviv’s booming economy, had opened a bicycling messenger service catering to the new boom in internet and high-tech companies. Soon there was plenty of money to go with the music.
Their other two children, a boy and a girl named Rami and Timla, had been born in rapid succession, and soon thereupon there followed a large house in Tel Aviv’s airy and affluent Jaffa district. They seemed to have it all: looks, money, three beautiful children. The kind of couple others—Simon and Etan’s mother among them—pointed to with a combination of adulation and envy.
But, as was almost always the case, cracks and crevices were forming just beneath the smooth veneer of the enviable. Though hardly inexperienced during her adolescent years in Tel Aviv, Oslo and Budapest (her father was an Israeli-born Hungarian, her mother a Norwegian), Daphna Flinker had married young—at hardly twenty—and had her first child just before her twenty-second birthday. Two children and ten years later, with her husband spending more and more of his time and energy emptying bills from the pockets of bicycle messengers and less and less on her, she had begun to feel she was missing something—sex above all—and she knew that, just below the portrait of the loving, beautiful, and happily married young mother she presented to the world, another canvas was beginning to take shape: that of a embittered young woman filled with unrequited hungers and unanswered cravings.
She was also a painter, and not without a modicum of talent, so that her small initial intimacies with Etan Yogev often focused on their shared artistic passion, as well as her comfortable, almost familial, friendship with his parents. She saw him as a young Chagall, herself as Frieda Kahlo (she even looked, a bit, the part—a kind of Latino sabra); she perceived him as a wild mop of hair that needed taming and felt herself a temptress eager and willing to domesticate it.
Etan Yogev had had no experience in bed—and hardly any outside of it—and it was not without a strong feeling of awkwardness and insecurity that he had first allowed Daphna Flinker to guide his somewhat ambivalent member into her own body, and his lips against her lips. She enjoyed it—this teacherly role—it had been a very long time since she had been able to practice the art of sexual instruction, and there was something exciting and alluring about this—all that innocence in a single place! Yes, he was unkempt, disorderly, possessed of an air of distraction, but nonetheless—nonetheless!—there was something—how else could she put it?—something adorable about him. She imagined that he closely resembled his father as a young man . . . and just look what had become of him!
As for young Etan, he had found it confusing at first—so much closeness to an actual human being! He had been reading about such pleasures for so long—so many Madame Bovarys and Anna Kareninas, so many lustful and tragic romantic heroines (even, from America, the occasional Edna Pontellier, parrots urging her on from their cages)—that the actual experiencing of one hardly seemed as novel, or exciting, as one might have imagined for a young boy losing his innocence to an older, more experienced, woman. What’s more, his younger brother had always been the one the girls were interested in, allowing his own romantic life to remain abstract and imaginary. And that was just the way he might—had he reflected upon such matters at all—have preferred it.
The day he had kissed Daphna for the first time they had ridden their bikes to the Sea of Galilee for a swim. It was late August—just at the height of Israeli summer before the High Holy Days—and the air was crisp and clear, the water revivifying, even shockingly, cold. Even he couldn’t help notice how lovely she was—even lovelier in a bathing suit where one could see, or imagine, all of her. She was small and dark, with fiery, passionate eyes and a little-girl-like laugh that suggested someone far younger than her years. And then there was her skin—dark, well-oiled, beckoning. It seemed to him like the skin of the heroines of the great romantic novels. It made him timid, but it also made something just below his waist begin to tingle.
When they lay together on the grassy shore of Galilee after emerging from the water, she placed a hand on his leg, stroking the thin hairs. Then she began kissing his neck, caressing his feet with her own. It felt good—no, it felt very good. And—awkwardly, timidly, ineptly at first—he responded, with her more than willing to show the way.
David and Sarah Yogev, like many members of the Israeli artistic and intellectual elite, were libertines insofar as their children’s sexual experience was concerned. So it was not so much disturbing that their almost twenty-one-year-old son was sleeping with their best friend’s married daughter