The car door slams shut in the driveway as I run the comb through my long black hair, completing the preparations on which I have spent hours as I await my benefactor's return. It is ironic that even though I have spent all day primping, I am wearing almost nothing. To ensure that I remain free, my strategy will be to titillate him so that while I am his guest, his life will be one of ecstasy as he stands between me and the officers of the Department of Homeland Security whose task it is to arrest and confine every Jewish citizen of the United States of America to a ghetto or worse.
I run to the bedroom window and open the curtains a crack to peer out. A red Volvo S60 is parked in the driveway and my friend Daniel is walking from his car to the front door of his house, where I am now his involuntary house guest for an indefinite stay. After dashing out of the bedroom and down the stairs to the foyer, I stand before the door to await his arrival.
Standing almost at attention at the door, I feel like a lowly private during boot camp, awaiting inspection from the drill instructor, fretting that I will not measure up. The drill in which I imagine myself is the most important in my life, for failure might result in the forfeiture of my freedom.
Never having prepared to act so blatantly sexual in front of a man with whom I have not shared intimacy, my mouth is dry and my heart pounds in my chest. Despite not having smoked since college, I crave a cigarette. As I polished my nails, bleached my mustache, shaved my legs, and plucked the tiny whiskers from my chin that are the bane of the lives of women of Mediterranean ancestry, I devised something clever to say to him. But in the heat of the moment my mind is drawing a blank.
Waiting as he traverses the short distance from the driveway to where I stand to greet him, I take in a deep breath, hoping to have not overplayed my hand, wishing that he be pleased by the new look of his old friend who unexpectedly landed on his doorstep the night before and desires her to be his intimate companion.
Upon seeing Daniel's silhouette through the translucent glass, I fling open the door. The young man into whose hands I have placed my fate is speechless as he regards me standing with my hands on my hips clad only in a black brassiere and matching bikini panties.
*****
Just one week before we had been colleagues on the medical staff of the local hospital after having serendipitously found jobs in the city in which we had lived as adolescents. Daniel's retired parents having just moved to Arizona, they took their house off the market upon their son's recent return to town so he could take up residence in the home in which he grew up while deciding if the surroundings he knew as a youth would be to his liking in his adult years.
.
Our medical practice involved making daily rounds on the wards visiting patients whose own doctors chose to cede the responsibility of caring for of inpatient to physicians on site in the hospital, who would be available quickly for emergencies when the need arose. Not infrequently, lulls in the workload allowed a friendship that had lain dormant since our teen years to be rekindled.
*****
Neither of us were particularly concerned that world events would ever affect the rhythm of our lives. My native Israel had recently overthrown the newly formed Islamist government of Jordan, which in its brief existence had abrogated the peace treaty signed by the wise King Hussein. The world was ready to accept the demise of another radical Middle Eastern regime and Israel's military occupation of the country, but the deportation of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip and West Bank into the newly conquered Arab lands made the Jewish state into a rogue nation.
The United Nations demanded that the refugees be returned to the encampments in which they had existed in squalor for more than a half century. Tough sanctions were imposed that made importation difficult for everything but food and medicine.
The nuclear armed Israelis refused to undo the ethnic cleansing of what had been known for decades as the Occupied Territories, having finally succeeded in realizing their longstanding ambition to incorporate the West Bank and Gaza into Eretz Israel. If sanctions were not lifted, the government in Jerusalem hinted that the oil rich Persian Gulf would be its next conquest.
To show the Zionists that the world meant business, the UN authorized the American air attack that crippled Israel's nuclear reactor, interrupting that nation's source of enriched uranium and decimating the brain trust that maintained the country's atomic weapons. Israel retaliated by launching the first nuclear attack since the end of the Second World War. A cruise missile equipped with a nuclear warhead was launched from a submarine in the Mediterranean Sea and detonated over the air base in Turkey from which the strike on Israel's reactor had been launched. Thousands of Americans and NATO personnel perished.
Some in the federal government had realized long before that the US and the ever more isolated state of Israel were on a collision course and that American Jews were a potential fifth column. At the behest of the FBI and Department of Homeland Security, over the years hackers had penetrated the computers of synagogues and major Jewish organizations, providing the names, addresses, and working places of virtually all Jewish Americans. Surreptitiously a plan had been formulated to confine Jews living in major cities within ghettos and collect those from the hinterlands into motels, tent cities, or prisons in the event of trouble between America and Israel.
*****
Standing before him in my skivvies, I cannot tell whether his expression is one of surprise or disgust. After he regards me for several seconds without saying a word, I take his right hand and guide him across the threshold closing the door behind us. Breaking the ice, I let go of his hand and stand before him, finally asking, "Do you like the way I look?"
"Sh-, sh-, sure!" he stammers.
It is not the reply that I expected, having dreamt that he might take me into his arms and kiss me, just like in the movies. Caught off guard, I don't know what to say next. Maybe he has become involved with somebody during the few days we have been apart. Or maybe it is just my fantasy that I turn him on. I suddenly feel self conscious.
"I don't look fat, do I?" I blurt out and then feel my face turning crimson. "Oh my god, I can't believe I just said that. That was so stupid. I can't believe I'm dressed this way. This was a dumb idea. I'll put some clothes on."
"You don't look fat. You're beautiful."
His deep voice is soothing. He could have been a public radio announcer. I wouldn't have been surprised if he had next uttered, 'And now we will hear the Adagio for Strings in D Minor.' The words I had rehearsed in the hours before his appearance now come back to my memory.
"OK. It's obvious how you feel about me. I've felt your eyes on me every time we've passed by one another, even back in high school. I was stupid for ignoring you then. You've been a wonderful friend. It's time for me to return your generosity."
I again take his hand and lead him up the steps. When I turn down the hall that leads to the master bedroom, he follows, but only reluctantly. We stop at the threshold and regard the king sized bed, made flawlessly by me earlier that day, which is beckoning us.
He turns to me and says, "That's a strange site. I almost never make the bed."
Onto my face shoot droplets of his saliva, the preternatural calm of a moment ago now gone.. Seeing that he has become even more nervous than I am, for an instant I regret choosing such a brazen way to broach the painful topic of our mutual attraction.
"I bet you make the bed when you think a girl might be coming over to spend the night," I counter, smiling lasciviously, hoping to steer the conversation in the direction of our impending intimacy.
He is silent and his countenance is grim. He makes no effort to cross the threshold into his bedroom. Frolicking with me on that bed seems the farthest thing from his mind. I panic, thinking that his next words will be a request for me to leave, that I should turn myself in to the authorities or find another place to hide.
.
"It's never happened. I've never had a woman over here. In fact, I've maybe had a half dozen dates in my whole life. That might even be an exaggeration. Friends of mine try to fix me up with blind dates, but they've all ended badly.
"For the first few years after I left home for college, it wasn't too bad. I could always find guys like me who weren't dating anyone and we'd go out and have a good time.
"But since coming back here, I've been lonely. In the last couple of years almost all of my friends have gotten married. The single guys my age are either losers or divorced. And the divorced ones have their kids to see on weekends. It's weird going to a baseball game with your buddy and his little kid.
"I'm starting to think I belong in the category of the losers, because I don't think I could even get laid in a morgue. Even when I'm at a convention in a big city and go to bars where the travel guides say eligible women who might want to meet a rich young doctor hang out, I don't know what to say and never manage to connect. After I try to make small talk, the girl nods and then drifts away after I've bored her enough."
"You don't have to worry about that with me. We have a lot in common. You know I find you interesting."
