LITMIR.BIZ

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three young children and their father she had fed at her table just weeks before. She wasn’t sure what she felt—Was it betrayal? Jealousy? Merely confusion? But one thing she knew for certain: She didn’t like it. Why couldn’t her older son, like his younger brother before him, simply choose an appropriate young virgin with whom to first experience the pleasures of the flesh?

      But, then, she reasoned, nothing else about her elder son had ever been appropriate—why should this be? She too had had her share of wild times, after all. As a twenty-five-year-old girl, she had gone to Paris for the express purpose of seducing the twenty-five year-older famous sculptor who was to become the boys’ father. And there had been plenty of amorous adventures prior to that as well. So why deny her young sons theirs? And, after several months, urged on by the obvious bemusement and vicarious pleasure her husband felt at this turn of events, she had even begun to get used to the idea.

      “Elle a quand même un beau cul,” David Yogev would remark in French, suggesting that certain of the more admirable portions of Daphna’s anatomy had not entirely escaped his attention. “Non, pas du tout,” his wife was forced to admit. Her husband, she recalled, had always been particularly fond of nice asses. Before gravity had begun to exact its inevitable toll, she had even been possessed of one of her own.

      As a young couple in Paris—or, rather, as a young woman and a significantly older man—she and David often sat in cafés and played what they affectionately called “the three-bed game.” Each one would name an artist or intellectual in Tel Aviv whom they knew (a man for him, a woman for her) and then—by going through a list of the lovers they each knew their selection to have had—they could usually determine that the two people they had chosen were never more than three beds apart! So incestuous was the world of the Israeli intelligentsia! So one had to admit that the story of Daphna Flinker and Etan Yogev seemed to fit right in.

      The real trouble, however, only began when Daphna’s attentions and ministrations began to shift from Etan to his younger brother. It had begun rather subtly—with her often sitting beside Simon, rather than Etan, at the dinner table, followed by what seemed longer and longer periods, during her visits with the children to the Yogev’s Galilee week-end home; that the two of them were absent from the house altogether. Then there were the glances, the seemingly accidental touches, all the signs Sarah Yogev could so well recognize from her own younger years.

      Daphna and Simon, of course, had done their best to make it seem as if there had been a full stop, followed by a long ellipse rather than a mere segue, that separated her relationships with the two brothers. The facts, however, belied such an explanation. Simon Yogev well remembered the first night Daphna Flinker had come to his bed in his parents’ Tel Aviv apartment. There had been a quiet dinner downstairs—his mother’s famous Hungarian goulash followed by her equally famous cheese-and-apricot strudel—during which he couldn’t help notice that Daphna’s gaze, rather than being directed at his older brother, was perpetually fixed on him, and that, from across the table, her feet brushed against his more frequently than mere chance might have allowed.

      That night, sleeping rather fitfully, he woke to the rustling of his own sheets and the warm, not unfamiliar, feeling of a woman’s flesh beside him, and then of equally warm lips descending his chest toward his still-sleeping member, accompanied by a feminine voice whispering sweetly in Hebrew, Ahuvi Simon… ahuvi, ahuvi, ahuvi. What had followed from that was the inevitable—a night filled with such fantastically lubricated lust and tenderness that not even a glimmer of fraternal loyalty could interfere with its pleasures. In the morning he would have to, as some writer his father liked—perhaps it was the Frenchman Zola?—had written, “swallow his large toad of nausea and regret,” in any event. There was now little question as to what Daphna Flinker’s real desires had been: Simon’s brother had merely been a way station en route to her actual goal, and now she had attained it. But, even before this, a certain unspoken tension between the brothers had long been in the air—how could it not have been? It would be devastating to his older brother, Simon thought guiltily (he was well acquainted with the story of Cain and Abel), from whom he had already stolen most of the future family glory, to have his first lover taken from him by his brother as well?

      She would simply break up with Etan, she promised him, she would tell him what perhaps had become obvious to him already—that, painting or no painting, they really didn’t have very much in common, that she didn’t really feel the relationship was good for either of them in the long run, and so on and so forth. (How then, Simon wondered, would she explain why the relationship was good for the two of them?)

      But beneath Simon Yogev’s veneer of otherworldliness there lay rather acute powers of intuition and observation. He had sensed Daphna’s impending flight from his sheets in favor of his brothers’ even before it had actually taken place. He may have looked like Heinrich Hoffmann’s Struwwelpeter, but he was possessed of his father’s foresight and intuition. And he could feel, nightly, the sense of Daphna’s flesh, as well as her attentions, unwinding from his own.

      Living in two almost entirely separate worlds—Etan in the world of intellect and art, Simon in that of sports and women—whatever rivalry might ever have existed between the brothers previously had been contained mostly below the surface. At times, Etan had even ventured a foray into his younger brother’s territory—as, for example, several years earlier, when he had taken up swimming and bicycling with a vengeance, managing to join the annual summer swim all the way across the Galilee. In the process, he had also developed a body far more muscular and sculpted physique than his disheveled, unkempt coiffure and otherworldly gaze might have suggested.

      But each seemed dominant within his own sphere, into which the other dared not tread, and Simon Yogev had always taken it for granted than his older brother—if he could somehow survive the daily tasks of paying the bills and doing his laundry—was heir apparent to their father’s artistic gifts, even if not to his capacities with women and soccer balls.

      So that Etan Yogev’s little romance with Daphna Flinker, in addition to providing his mother with a few sleepless nights, had provided a not entirely unwelcome realignment of the status quo, and that, if nothing else, had provided Sarah Yogev with a certain welcome relief: Perhaps her older son, after all, was not doomed to a life of being cared for by his mother, or by some doughty, desperate young woman sufficiently enamored of his artistic gifts to overlook the absence of most others. Perhaps he would still grow up to be “normal,” whatever that meant.

      So, when the transition from the older brother’s bed to the younger’s openly took place, the fault lines between fantasy and reality suddenly split open as well, and, with them, the relative peace and contentment that had, for some months, characterized the Yogev family’s winter and early spring came to an end. Now it was not only Simon’s potentially wrecked future (Daphna Flinker, Sarah Yogev feared, was ripe for motherhood yet once again), but his older brother’s apparently fractured ego that needed tending to, not to mention the Cold War-like mini-détente that now erected a kind of psychological Berlin Wall between the two brothers’ sleeping quarters as well as in their day-to-day relations.

      Etan, to put it simply, was heartbroken, his brother guilt-ridden, their briefly shared concubine triumphantly radiant.

      Like someone moving backwards through the seven stages of grief, Sarah Yogev slowly moved from her initial state of shock and disbelief, followed reluctantly by acceptance and hope, to profound depression, followed by unmitigated anger at her younger son and his much older girlfriend, and then by a profound sense of guilt toward her fragile and hyper-sensitive older son for having allowed the liaison with a so much older—and still married!—woman to go on to begin with. Now the bargaining stage was about to begin, but it was not yet clear to her where on the table her chips lay, or whether, perhaps, simple denial might be the wiser course.

      One thing she decidedly didn’t want, she kept reminding herself as she was once again confronted—at an even higher volume—with Daphna Flinker nightly (and occasionally mid-afternoon) orgasmic elocutions from upstairs, was a grandchild at this point in her life, much less three step-grandchildren to go with it. So she rather unsubtly placed a package of condoms right beside Simon’s bed and another in the

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