Years before I understood bodies—my body, and the things I put it through in the arms of men I persuaded myself to love—I spent some months in Israel. I was not, as many American Jews are, seeking a homeland or some vindication of the Jewish military know-how. I was there for all the reasons women of a certain age and naivety go anywhere: men. But Israel became something else to me. A kibbutz in an ancient valley of sand and rock, drunk starstretched bicycle rides through date orchards, the feel of worshipped stone underfoot and underpalm, coffee at all hours. There was the sting of seas—the Dead and the Red and the Mediterranean. There was Arak and hookah and halva and hummus.

These are the sensations of the body, memory alive in the skin and the gut that cannot, no matter the degree of contemplation or the true turn of a sentence, be replicated. Imagine, for example, a girl of twenty, accounting, bodily, for this moment:

She’s with a man on a mattress tucked against a valley wall that separates one desert from another. The one splayed out below is hers—date orchards and mud buildings and the dairy cows that, sometimes, waiting for a sleep that never comes, she walks among. Behind them—the girl and the man—is the other desert: echoes and lights of a country practicing against peace. The man she’s with has spent his last year in India, and before that, inside a tank soldiering through a strip of land that has always been soldiered through. Of course, she’ll want to touch him. Of course, when his mouth is there working her over in its thin drunk way, she will have no desire against it. There is the dark underhang of the valley wall; and in it, the body becomes the mattress and the mud, the blanket of stars, the violent light bursts of the night.

  Now, imagine this girl, a fool for this country and most things, never having been beyond what’s comfortable, never having left the Midwest, let alone the continent.

This was the first and only time I was fiancé to anyone, Isaac—American, Jewish, not the man on the mattress, not born Israeli but determined to be one anyway. During my time in Israel, both of us naïve and twenty, he was on the border in Lebanon. He had signed himself into citizenship, which meant that, for the subsequent decades, his body was contracted to a country: they go, I go. His was a body of war.

The first full year after he enlisted, I tolerated it from afar. And then I no longer could. I felt that to prove my love, I must rely on proximity.

I did not intend to destroy things.          

In the first month, I met Isaac only once, in Tel Aviv. We had the city, modern and well-lit but with something foreign like heat, like the smell of sand at night, the scent of day renounced: sweat salt, tobacco. He owned a motorbike then, not the obnoxious American kind, but a slight two-wheeled thing, maneuverable and capable of great feats of speed. Together, in the night, we slipped between cars, my arms around him, knotted at his chest, grown broader, muscles tight. He was difficult to hold onto. Unyielding. He felt foreign to me, his body changed.

  I suppose that was how it began, something small. Isn’t that always how it is? Some little unwanted truth. There was the new strangeness of Isaac’s body and then the way he wrote to me, evidence of his burgeoning wisdom: Many euphemisms for death all used administratively. They go to bed and I’m alone. A boy with a rifle and too much coffee.

For the first month, I carried them with me; it was a gesture of how a lover ought to act. I carried them at night while wandering around the little dairy, in the kitchen on the dish line, unloading the delivery trucks, in the laundry room. The noble services owed by young Jews to their holy land. 

But there was Yoav, the man on the mattress, Israeli born. And there was that difference already with him: Israeli by birth, solider by blood. There was the way he spoke, sight always rested sideways, beside me or behind me, concerned with a specific rock, a date palm. At a certain point, I stopped carrying Isaac’s letters in his presence.

  The land is foreign, imagine, Yoav foreign, Isaac himself half-foreign—the girl is a body desiring of “foreign.” The girl contracted to one man but screwing another. And, when the fiancé shows up, a surprise, an unexpected leave, he knows. Not immediately, not in the first sweep of her to his arms, but around the fire, under the mud canopy that has been shaped into the appearance of branches.

She is talking nonstop: How is it there? How are you here, now? Has it been difficult and hot and horribly boring?

       He does not answer her directly, or he does and she doesn’t listen. He holds her hand, her thigh. He looks not at her but at the light on her—the fire and the specter of fire cast off the mud, a muted orange—like fall. And she suddenly aches for fall—in Minneapolis. She hates this place, she realizes, his chosen holy land. She’s hateful and jealous as though he’s the one who has taken a lover. Because, in a way, he had.

I know this now, about that moment. It was the convergence of the truth and all that I had learned as a woman. It was, in a sense, simple: jealousy. Isaac had his land, his place to possess, his parameters of existence: wake, eat, patrol, eat, patrol, sleep. Love thy chosen country. Isaac loved his country. And I was all body. Desire me, Isaac, Yoav. Desire me, David, Jonah, Samuel, that man at the bar in Chicago. Above all else, desire me. Desire what is just beyond reach, just beyond my body.  

  Isaac did not leave me then. No, it was not the ending of an engagement as one might expect. He wrote to me, shorter speculative sketches of philosophies that said nothing about what he was: How men learn to jerk off to women. I am caught by the moon.

No brutal rebuttals or gallant attempts of reconciliation. Just an unraveling. Just the spreading of an apathy that had always been there, not the loss of love, but the realization of indifference.

Nothing came of Yoav. I did not care for him after Isaac’s visit. He was rough with his hands and his mouth, and there was nothing beyond desert between us.

That night by the fire, Isaac realizing I was no longer his, we spoke of the food, the weather, the politics, the land. But later, in my room, it was a memory, untethered.

“Remember,” he said, “the time at the lake? Remember, you hated baiting? Bait. The worm. You couldn’t stand to touch it. Remember, I wouldn’t let you fish unless you did?”

“Yes,” I said. “I do remember that.”

And the feel of the creature splitting.