Life on Sandpaper

Excerpt from Yoram Kaniuk's "Life on Sandpaper" (translated from Hebrew by Anthony Berris):

A young woman, I don't remember whether she as good-looking or not, was tied to the dog, and I think her name was Gloria. At first she regarded me with contempt because I looked like a vagrant. I didn't have a cent to my name, I said something, then she said something, then I said to her, Taketh me to thy pad, because at Chez Inezz in Paris I'd learned what was then known as bop talk and which later became widely used American slang, but at the time was the secret language of jazz musicians. I'd studied Julius Caesar in high school and now I joined the two lingos together. My sentence turned  Gloria on and she asked what a pad was and I explained that it's an apartment; she hadn't heard  the term before and seemed amused. We talked for a while, I pet the dog again. She took me to her apartment near the park on Fifth Avenue, building number one, twentieth floor. She fed me. I told her stories, that I was from the desert and my mother was a shepherdess and that I rode camels, because camels, r so I 'd been given to understand by Gand back in Paris, work wonders in New York. I told her about a girl I'd loved in Israel who'd dumped me. I told her that my family were farmers in the Jordan Valley and they'd know the Patriarchs Abraham, Issac, and Jacob personally. We got into bed and did what you do in bed and she said, You could pull a knife now and kill me, and I agreed that objectively speaking that was true. She said, You don't know me subjectively, and I said neither did she. She got up and walked backward with her eyes closed and didn't bump into anything in the bedroom filled with all kinds of clothes, tennis balls, chairs, and her intimidating little dog, and there were lots of shoes spread all over the beautiful wooden floor. There was an iron there too. The telephone was on the floor. Again she walked backward with her eyes closed and kept saying, Look how marvelous I am! She fell asleep but I still couldn't drop off myself and so I look at her. She slept like a soldier at roll call, disciplined and obedient, her arms at her sides. But I saw on her face an expression of hopeless anguish. It hurt me. I had enough of my own. I almost left, but this was a new type of loneliness on the twentieth or thirtieth of fifteenth floor of a fancy building, loneliness I hadn't yet encountered. And then the phone rang, she jumped up, answered, her eyes flashed with hatred, she pushed twenty dollars into my hand and threw me out.