The History of Love (10 page)

The idea of evolution is so beautiful and sad. Since the earliest life on earth, there have been somewhere between five and fifty billion species, only five to fifty million of which are alive today. So, ninety-nine percent of all the species that have ever lived on earth are extinct.

25.
MY BROTHER, THE MESSIAH

That night while I was reading, Bird came into my room and climbed into bed with me. At eleven and a half, he was small for his age. He pressed his little cold feet into my leg. “Tell me something about Dad,” he whispered. “You forgot to cut your toenails,” I said. He kneaded the balls of his feet into my calf. “Please?” he begged. I tried to think, and because I couldn’t remember anything I hadn’t already told him a hundred times, I made up something. “He liked to rock-climb,” I said. “He was a good climber. Once he climbed up a rock that was, like, two hundred feet tall. Somewhere in the Negev, I think.” Bird breathed his hot breath on my neck. “Masada?” he asked. “Could be,” I said. “He just liked it. It was a hobby,” I said. “Did he like to dance?” Bird asked. I had no idea if he liked to dance, but I said, “He loved it. He could even do the tango. He learned it in Buenos Aires. He and Mom danced all the time. He’d move the coffee table against the wall and use the whole room. He used to lift her and dip her and sing in her ear.” “Was I there?” “Sure you were,” I said. “He used to throw you up in the air and catch you.” “How’d he know he wouldn’t drop me?” “He just knew.” “What did he call me?” “Lots of things. Buddy, Little Guy, Punch.” I was making it up as I went. Bird looked unimpressed. “Judah the Maccabee,” I said. “Plain Maccabee. Mac.” “What’s the thing he called me the
most
?” “I guess it was Emmanuel.” I pretended to think. “No, wait. It was Manny. He used to call you Manny.” “
Manny
,” Bird said, testing it out. He cuddled closer. “I want to tell you a secret,” he whispered. “Because it’s your birthday.” “What?” “First you have to promise to believe me.” “OK.” “Say ‘I promise.’ ” “I promise.” He took a deep breath. “I think I might be a
lamed vovnik
.” “A what?” “One of the
lamed vovniks
,” he whispered. “The thirty-six holy people.” “
What
thirty-six holy people?” “The ones that the existence of the world depends on.” “Oh,
those
. Don’t be—” “You promised,” Bird said. I didn’t say anything. “There are always thirty-six at any time,” he whispered. “No one knows who they are. Only their prayers reach God’s ear. That’s what Mr. Goldstein says.” “And you think you might be one of them,” I said. “What else does Mr. Goldstein say?” “He says that when the Messiah comes, he’s going to be one of the
lamed vovniks
. In every generation there’s one person who has the potential to be the Messiah. Maybe he lives up to it, or maybe he doesn’t. Maybe the world is ready for him, or maybe it isn’t. That’s all.” I lay in the dark trying to think of the right thing to say. My stomach began to hurt.

26.
THE SITUATION VERGED ON CRITICAL

The next Saturday I put
Life as We Don’t Know It
into my backpack and took the subway up to Columbia University. I wandered around the campus for forty-five minutes until I found Eldridge’s office in the Earth Sciences building. When I got there the secretary eating take-out said Dr. Eldridge wasn’t around. I said I would wait, and he said maybe I should come back another time since Dr. Eldridge wouldn’t be in for a few hours. I told him I didn’t mind. He went back to his food. While I waited, I read one issue of
Fossil
magazine. Then I asked the secretary, who was laughing out loud about something on his computer, if he thought Dr. Eldridge would be back soon. He stopped laughing and looked at me like I’d just ruined the most important moment of his life. I went back to my seat and read one issue of
Paleontologist Today.

I got hungry, so I went down the hall and got a package of Devil Dogs from a vending machine. Then I fell asleep. When I woke up the secretary was gone. The door of Eldridge’s office was open, and the lights were on. Inside, a very old man with white hair was standing next to a filing cabinet under a poster that said: HENCE WITHOUT PARENTS, BY SPONTANEOUS BIRTH, RISE HE FIRST SPECKS OF ANIMATED EARTH—
ERASMUS DARWIN.

“Well to be honest I hadn’t thought of that option,” the old man said into the phone. “I doubt he’d even want to apply. Anyway, I think we already have our man. I’ll have to talk to the department, but let’s just say things are looking good.” He saw me standing at the door and made a gesture that he’d be off in a moment. I was about to say it was OK, I was waiting for Dr. Eldridge, but he turned his back and gazed out the window. “Good, glad to hear it. I better run. Right, then. All the best. ’Bye now.” He turned to me. “Terribly sorry,” he said. “What can I help you with?” I scratched my arm and noticed the dirt under my fingernails. “You’re not Dr. Eldridge are you?” I asked. “I am,” he said. My heart sank. Thirty years must have passed since the photograph on the book was taken. I didn’t have to think for very long to know that he couldn’t help me with the thing I had come about, because even if he deserved a Nobel for being the greatest living paleontologist, he also deserved one for being the oldest.

I didn’t know what to say. “I read your book,” I managed, “and I’m thinking of becoming a paleontologist.” He said: “Well don’t sound so disappointed.”

27.
ONE THING I AM NEVER GOING TO DO WHEN I GROW UP

Is fall in love, drop out of college, learn to subsist on water and air, have a species named after me, and ruin my life. When I was little my mother used to get a certain look in her eyes and say, “One day you’re going to fall in love.” I wanted to say, but never said: Not in a million years.

The only boy I’d ever kissed was Misha Shklovsky. His cousin taught him in Russia, where he lived before he moved to Brooklyn, and he taught me. “Not so much tongue,” was all he said.

28.
A HUNDRED THINGS CAN CHANGE YOUR LIFE; A LETTER IS ONE

Five months passed and I’d almost given up on finding someone to make my mother happy. Then it happened: in the middle of last February a letter arrived, typed on blue airmail paper and postmarked from Venice, forwarded to my mother from her publisher. Bird saw it first, and brought it to Mom to ask if he could have the stamps. We were all in the kitchen. She opened it and read it standing up. Then she read it a second time, sitting down. “This is amazing,” she said. “What?” I asked. “Someone wrote to me about
The History of Love.
The book Dad and I named you after.” She read the letter aloud to us.

Dear Ms. Singer,

I just finished your translation of the poems of Nicanor Parra, who, as you say, “wore on his lapel a little Russian astronaut, and carried in his pockets the letters of a woman who left him for another.” It’s sitting here next to me on the table in my room in a pensione overlooking the Grand Canal. I don’t know what to say about it, except that it moved me in a way one hopes to be moved each time he begins a book. What I mean is, in some way I’d find almost impossible to describe, it changed me. But I won’t go on about that. The truth is, I’m writing not to thank you, but to make what might seem like an odd request. In your introduction, you mentioned in passing a little-known writer, Zvi Litvinoff, who escaped from Poland to Chile in 1941, and whose single published work, written in Spanish, is called
The History of Love
. My question is: would you consider translating it? It would be solely for my personal use; I don’t have any intention of publishing it, and the rights would remain yours if you wished to do so yourself. I’d be willing to pay whatever you think is a fair price for the work. I always find these matters awkward. Could we say, $100,000? There. If that strikes you as too little, please let me know.

I’m imagining your response as you read this letter —which by then will have spent a week or two sitting in this lagoon, then another month riding the chaos of the Italian mail system, before finally crossing the Atlantic and being passed over to the US Post Office, who will have transferred it into a sack to be pushed along in a cart by a mailman who’ll have slugged through rain or snow in order to slip it through your mail slot where it will have dropped to the floor, to wait for you to find it. And having imagined it, I’m prepared for the worst, in which you take me for some sort of lunatic. But maybe it doesn’t need to be that way. Maybe if I tell you that a very long time ago someone once read to me as I was falling asleep a few pages from a book called
The History of Love
, and that all these years later I haven’t forgotten that night, or those pages, you’d understand.

I’d be grateful if you could send your response to me here, care of the above address. In case I’ve already gone by the time it arrives the concierge will forward my mail.

Yours eagerly,
Jacob Marcus

I thought, Holy cow! I could hardly believe our luck, and considered writing back to Jacob Marcus myself with the excuse of explaining that it was Saint-Exupéry who’d established the last southern section of the mail route to South America in 1929, all the way to the tip of the continent. Jacob Marcus seemed nterested in mail, and, anyway, once my mother had pointed out that it was in part because of Saint-Ex’s courage that Zvi Litvinoff, the author of
The History of Love
, could later receive the final letters from his family and friends in Poland. At the end of the letter I would add something about my mother being single. But I thought better of it, in case she somehow found out, spoiling what had begun so well, and without any meddling. A hundred thousand dollars was a lot of money. But I knew that even if Jacob Marcus had offered almost nothing, my mother would have still agreed to do it.

29.
MY MOTHER USED TO READ TO ME FROM
THE HISTORY OF LOVE

“
The first woman may have been Eve, but the first girl will always be Alma
,”
she’d say, the Spanish book open on her lap while I lay in bed. This was when I was four or five, before Dad got sick and the book was put away on a shelf. “Maybe the first time you saw her you were ten. She was standing in the sun scratching her legs. Or tracing letters in the dirt with a stick. Her hair was being pulled. Or she was pulling someone’s hair. And a part of you was drawn to her, and a part of you resisted—wanting to ride off on your bicycle, kick a stone, remain uncomplicated. In the same breath you felt the strength of a man, and a self-pity that made you feel small and hurt. Part of you thought: Please don’t look at me. If you don’t, I can still turn away. And part of you thought: Look at me.

“If you remember the first time you saw Alma, you also remember the last. She was shaking her head. Or disappearing across a field. Or through your window.
Come back, Alma!
you shouted.
Come back! Come back!

“But she didn’t.

“And though you were grown up by then, you felt as lost as a child. And though your pride was broken, you felt as vast as your love for her. She was gone, and all that was left was the space where you’d grown around her, like a tree that grows around a fence.

“For a long time, it remained hollow. Years, maybe. And when at last it was filled again, you knew that the new love you felt for a woman would have been impossible without Alma. If it weren’t for her, there would never have been an empty space, or the need to fill it.

“Of course there are certain cases in which the boy in question refuses to stop shouting at the top of his lungs for Alma. Stages a hunger strike. Pleads. Fills a book with his love. Carries on until she has no choice but to come back. Every time she tries to leave, knowing it’s what has to be done, the boy stops her, begging like a fool. And so she always returns, no matter how often she leaves or how far she goes, appearing soundlessly behind him and covering his eyes with her hands, spoiling for him anyone who could ever come after her.”