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On Yom Kippur my wife and I play a game she learned from someone at work. The way it goes is each person has to say two things about himself: one that everyone already knows, and another that no one in the room knew before.

My wife goes first. She says that she loves me and that she slept with another man. I ask her who, and she says he’s just some guy from management and I don’t know him. I ask if he’s the one who taught her the game and she says yes. I’m curious to know what he told her about himself that she didn’t know before, and she says he told her that she and his wife have almost the exact same hairstyle, and that when he does it doggystyle with his wife, he always looks at the back of her neck right when he’s about to come and imagines that she’s my wife.

“Hang on,” I say, “I don’t get it. Is that the thing you knew before?”

My wife laughs. “No, dummy, that’s the thing I didn’t know.”

“Okay… And what did he tell you that you already knew?”

“That he’s not Jewish. I mean, you know, he’s not circumcised. His family moved here from Russia.”

“And everyone at work already knew he wasn’t circumcised?! Was it on the agenda for a team meeting, or what?”

“Stop it,” she scolds me in a childish voice, “you’re holding up the game. Now it’s your turn to say two things.”

I try to think of two things. But the thing I’m really thinking about is that Russian guy from the office. I think he’s called Roman. That’s the only Russian name I’ve heard her mention, at any rate. Him and some guy called Yuri, but this Yuri is definitely gay.

“Go on,” she says, “tell me your two things already.”

The first thing I tell her is that it was me who burned the silver Skoda that belonged to the neighbor who was always parking it right in front of our entryway. I can’t remember her name: kind of tall, squeaky voice? And the second thing is that I’ve been depressed for almost two years and I constantly have suicidal thoughts.

My wife is quite for a moment, and then she says I wasn’t following the rules of the game because I told her two things she didn’t know instead of one. I sit quietly for a few seconds too, and then I ask if she’s sure we didn’t talk about that tall woman with the shrill voice, and about how when I tried to tell her she couldn’t keep blocking the entrance, she flipped out at me as if I were the one doing something wrong. “Don’t you remember? We talked about it when we were standing outside, just before the firetruck arrived.” My wife says she definitely remembers the car going up in flames but that I never told her it was me who set it on fire. She insists that I change one of my statements to something else, something she already knows about me.

I ask her if the Russian guy from work is called Roman, and she sighs and says I’m totally missing the point: instead of going with the flow of associative thoughts and seeing where it takes me, I’m getting bogged down in trivial factoids. When she and Roman played, they couldn’t care less about the world outside. All that mattered was the game and the brilliant honesty it uncovered. Which meant that one minute they could be talking about how Roman and his wife take the kids to his parents in Ness Ziona for dinner every Friday, and his mother, who was raised Christian after WWII, says a blessing over the Shabbat candles and cries, and the next minute my wife could find herself on her knees in the office, giving Roman a blow job. “But with you,” she mutters, “there’s no letting loose, no taking flight. You’re all about keeping score and trading gossip.”

I tell her she’s right, I ruined it, I’m sorry, from now on I’ll go with the flow. And then I quickly ask, like it’s no big deal, why she loves me. She pauses, shuts her eyes, then smiles. “I love you,” she says, “because of what you’re not: you’re not violent, not a coward, and not selfish like all the other shits around me.” I ask her if an uncircumcised dick feels different in your mouth, on your tongue—does it feel like a dick and something else? Dick-plus?

My wife opens her eyes and looks at me. Her smile has almost completely vanished. “Never mind, I can see this isn’t the game for us,” she says, standing up. “I’m going out for a smoke.”

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