by Shira Carmi
One night, Diana becomes convinced that David, a psychoanalyst and her husband of nineteen years, is having an affair. He receives a phone call on a Friday evening from an unknown woman and proceeds to have a private conversation with her in French. Told in first person from Diana’s point of view, the book goes on to depict how David and Diana first met, at a film festival in Montpellier, France, where Diana won a prize for her short film about a woman possessed by a demon. Since then, their relationship has been stable and steady, though as her anxiety about this suspected infidelity exacerbates, Diana reveals some of the tensions that have been lurking beneath the surface of their marriage—her sense that she has lost the litheness and lightness that used to make her attractive; her feeling that she has tricked David into falling in love with her by offering an image of an ambitious artist (though she never made another film after that festival winner, and has since embarked on a successful career in real estate); and her insinuated contempt for David, who comes off as somewhat rigid and controlling, and whose small penis she comments on repeatedly in her inner monologue. When the mystery woman calls him again, Diana confronts David. At first he says that she is one of his patients, but Diana dismisses this claim because all of his other patients’ numbers are saved in his phone’s contacts. He then tries to turn the allegations around, saying that Diana is projecting her frustration with their teenage son, Oren, who is rebelling and pulling away from her, onto her husband. Finally, David seems to forego these deflections and admit that there are some things he wishes to keep to himself, while insisting that he is not cheating on Diana. Around the same time, Diana is hired to sell the apartment of a long-time client’s recently deceased parents. Upon her first visit to the apartment, she realizes that its balcony faces the back of David’s clinic. Against her own ethics, she convinces the client not to rush the sale and offer the apartment for an exorbitant price so that she may buy herself some more spying time. One day, she watches David masturbate onto a leather seat just moments after a female patient was sitting there. Diana feels disgusted by David and by their son, both of whom seem to be unable to control their base urges. Feeling that by refusing to admit to his affair he is intentionally causing her to feel hysterical and unhinged, Diana decides to pursue the truth. She installs a wire device that calls her phone whenever a voice is heard in the clinic. Only wishing to listen in on his private French conversations, Diana instead receives dozens of calls whenever David is with a patient. Though she hangs up as soon as she realizes he is in the middle of a treatment session, she is still exposed to snippets of his life as a clinician. At the apartment for sale, Diana runs into Tzuf, a young man who lives across the hall and has a key. He claims to be using it as a quiet place to work on his novel, but Diana sees no evidence of his writing practice. She soon finds out that Tzuf’s live-in girlfriend is the patient who inspired David’s masturbation. Diana finds Tzuf intensely attractive and begins to fantasize about him. In an aside, Diana reveals that her sexual drive took over at the age of seven, and that by age eleven she’d manipulated two boys from school into having intercourse with her. Though she knew her urges were inappropriate for her age and kept them as secret as she could, word got out and some children referred to her as a pervert. She has since done all she could to repress her urges and put on a show of frigidity and asexuality, to the point of failing to recognize men’s interest in her—though many showed interest. The next time Tzuf’s girlfriend, Lia, comes in for a therapy session, Diana can’t help herself and listens in from the apartment for sale. She learns that Lia feels Tzuf behaves too much like a single man before being caught by Tzuf, who is appalled at her behavior but softens when she cries and tells him that her husband is cheating on her. When she asks about his writing implements, he says he comes to the apartment not to write his novel but to conduct research for it. After finally recording a conversation between David and his mystery woman, Diana takes the recording to the beach, where a French tourist offers a translation that appears to prove a secret relationship. Diana goes into a sort of fugue state, stumbling into the sea and then fainting on the beach. In a conversation with Lia, she learns that Lia is three years older than Tzuf and that Tzuf has a thing for older women. She also learns that Lia broke her engagement with another man in order to be with Tzuf and that sometimes she feels that this has created excessive tension in their relationship. Tzuf makes up an excuse in order to join Diana in the apartment for sale, where he compliments her looks and asks for her advice regarding a plotline about an affair between a young man and an older woman. She evades his invitation to a fencing match. Later that day Diana asks David to give her some space and drives up to the Golan Heights to confide in her sister, who recognizes that Diana has a crush on Tzuf and warns her not to get in over her head. When Diana returns to Tel Aviv, she goes back to the apartment for sale, where she falls asleep while spying on David. Tzuf wakes her up in the evening, cooks her dinner, and asks her once again to fence with him for research purposes. Diana finally relents, and as they don their fencing gear, she notices that Tzuf is erect. He claims that he is just excited about their duel. As they begin to spar, she refuses to attack Tzuf. He tries to get her riled up by poking her over and over again, hurting her preexisting back injury and ignoring her cries. Finally, she loses her cool and throws her sabre at him. Exhausted and in pain, she lies in bed, where Tzuf gives her a sports massage. When he asks to stop the massage because he is erect, she suggests that he masturbate to alleviate the pressure and then continue the massage, which she finds very helpful. But when she opens her eyes and sees him bringing himself to climax beside her on the bed, she loses control of her urges, stripping off the defenses she had assumed years ago. Diana and Tzuf have a long night and morning of passionate, uninhibited sex, during which Diana spots signs that Tzuf must have been using the apartment for other conquests. But when they have sex by the window overlooking David’s clinic, Diana notices that David is holding the wire device in his hands as he speaks to a patient. Startled, Diana injures her back and takes a taxi to the hospital, where a doctor suspects that she was raped. Before she leaves, Diana tells Tzuf that she knows he has brought many women to this apartment. At the hospital, Diana thinks about how she would like herself and everyone else to live comfortably and happily with their sexual urges rather than attempt to restrain them. When she returns home, Diana is appalled to find porn on her son’s computer that features men urinating on women. She finds a vibrator she’d kept tucked in a drawer for two decades, since receiving it at her bachelorette party, and masturbates, feeling that she has set loose the demon inside of her. David comes home and is very happy to see her. In a moment of intimacy, she feels that they might have an open conversation, but instead she seduces him. In the shower after sex she hears him conduct a brief phone conversation in French, after which he tells her he has to see a patient for an urgent session later that day. When they go out to lunch afterwards, she announces that she wants to quit the real estate business and return to filmmaking, with the intention of shooting a pornographic movie for women. David confronts her about the wire device, which he mistakes for a phone charger—he knows she came into his clinic. Diana makes up an excuse and David takes the wire device back to the clinic, enabling Diana to continue to spy. At the time when David is meant to have his “urgent session,” he does not come to the clinic at all. Diana and Tzuf have one more sexual congress, after which Diana stays away from the apartment for sale. She confronts David again, revealing that she knows the name of the woman he has been speaking to—Christine. He blows up and heads off to Paris by himself for several days, leaving Diana to lie alone in bed and feel that the best days of her life—when she was eleven and full of desire that she did not yet realize was considered perverted—were behind her. When David returns from Paris, Diana hears Lia over the wire telling him that Tzuf left her because he was in love with another woman. Diana is very eager to patch things up with David, who is distant but clarifies that he is not interested in other women. Unlike her, he seems to be at peace with the fact that their relationship has lost its spark over the years. Tzuf meets Diana and tells her that he is in love with her. He reads her a sentence from his novel in progress and she criticizes his writing and berates his emotions. Diana returns to her life with David. The novel skips two years ahead. Diana and David are settled into a calm and functional marriage. She never found out who Christine was and what happened between them, if anything, nor did she tell him about her affair with Tzuf. One day, a messenger delivers Tzuf’s novel to her. The novel is called Diana and David, and though it doesn’t include their last names, it uses unveiled details from her and her husband’s real lives. Diana is horrified by the possible implications. Impressions I found this novel very gripping. The plot was propulsive, and the notion of the return of the repressed is very compelling. The short chapters pull the reader in and the novel is read quickly and breathlessly. The voice and themes are in line with David’s work in psychoanalysis: Both the delving into the depths of her characters’ psyches, the complex and parallel relationships between Diana and the men in her life, and the recurring images of hanging fruit and weapons that remind Diana of male genitalia, all create a language that mirrors the contents of the book. At times the writing was a little too stilted and flowery for my taste, but that can easily be tweaked in translation (and in my experience English translations tend to naturally be a little more conversational in tone). There are shining moments of insight and inspired writing (for instance, when Diana fantasizes about a world in which people could speak honestly about their sexual urges) strewn throughout the plot. The one major disappointment for me was the ending. I felt like the book burned with intensity and then fizzled out. Even though the message of the book is clear—it was never about David, but about Diana’s repressed urges that had to come back and haunt her—I still felt let down by the lack of revelation about who Christine was and whether or not David was having an affair with her. I also thought there could have been a little more time dedicated to Tzuf’s book and Diana’s fears about what trouble it might cause.