The History of Love (34 page)

8.
AND AGAIN

Jacob Marcus

9.
HOLY COW

I flipped back to the photograph. Then I read the whole first page. Then I flipped back to the photograph, read another page, then flipped back and stared at the photograph. Jacob Marcus was just a character in a book! The man who’d been sending letters to my mother the whole time was the writer Isaac Moritz. Alma’s
son
. He’d been signing his letters with the character of his most famous book! A line from his letter came back to me:
Sometimes I even pretend to write, but I’m not fooling anyone.

I got to page fifty-eight before the library closed. It was already dark when I got outside. I stood in front of the entrance with the book under my arm, watching the rain and trying to grasp the situation.

10.
THE SITUATION

That night while my mother was upstairs translating
The History of Love
for the man whose name she thought was Jacob Marcus, I finished
The Remedy
, about a character named Jacob Marcus, by a writer named Isaac Moritz, who was the son of the character Alma Mereminski, who also happened to have been real.

11.
WAITING

When I’d finished the last page, I called Misha and let it ring twice before hanging up. This was a code we’d used when we wanted to speak to each other late at night. It had been more than a month since we’d last talked. I’d made a list in my notebook of all the things I missed about him. The way he wrinkles his nose when he’s thinking was one. How he holds things was another. But now I needed to talk to him for real and no list would substitute. I stood by the phone while my stomach turned itself inside out. During the time I waited, a whole species of butterfly may have become extinct, or a large, complex mammal with feelings like mine.

But he never called back. This probably meant he didn’t want to talk to me.

12.
ALL THE FRIENDS I EVER HAD

Down the hall in his room my brother was asleep, his
kippah
dropped to the floor. Printed on the lining in gold letters was
Marsha and Joe’s Wedding, June 13, 1987,
and though Bird claimed to have found it in the dining room cabinet and was convinced it had belonged to Dad, none of us had ever heard of Marsha or Joe. I sat down next to him. His body was warm, almost hot. I thought about how, if I hadn’t made up so many things about Dad, maybe Bird wouldn’t have worshipped him so much and believed he himself needed to be something extraordinary.

Rain splashed against windows. “Wake up,” I whispered. He opened his eyes and groaned. Light shone in from the hallway. “Bird” I said, touching his arm. He squinted up at me and rubbed his eye. “You have to stop talking about God, OK?” He didn’t say anything, but I was pretty sure he was awake now. “You’re going to be twelve soon. You have to stop making weird noises, and jumping off things and hurting yourself.” I knew I was pleading with him, but I didn’t care. “You have to stop wetting your bed,” I whispered, and now in the dim light I saw the hurt on his face. “You have to just push your feelings down and try to be normal. If you don’t . . .” His mouth tightened, but he didn’t speak. “You have to make some friends,” I said. “I have a friend,” he whispered. “Who?” “Mr. Goldstein.” “You have to make more than one.” “You don’t have more than one,” he said. “The only person who ever calls you is Misha.” “Yes, I do. I have plenty of friends,” I said, and only as the words came out did I realize they weren’t true.

13.
IN ANOTHER ROOM, MY MOTHER SLEPT CURLED NEXT TO THE WARMTH OF A PILE OF BOOKS

14.
I TRIED NOT TO THINK ABOUT

a) Misha Shklovsky

b) Luba the Great

c) Bird

d) My mother

e) Isaac Moritz

15.
I SHOULD

Get out more, join some clubs. I should buy some new clothes, dye my hair blue, let Herman Cooper take me on a ride in his father’s car, kiss me, and possibly even feel my nonexistent breasts. I should develop some useful skills like public speaking, electric cello, or welding, see a doctor about my stomachaches, find a hero that is not a man who wrote a children’s book and crashed his plane, stop trying to set up my father’s tent in record time, throw away my notebooks, stand up straight, and cut this habit of answering any question regarding my well-being with a reply fit for a prim English schoolgirl who believes life is nothing but a long preparation for a few finger sandwiches with the Queen.

16.
A HUNDRED THINGS CAN CHANGE YOUR LIFE

I opened my desk drawer and turned it upside down in search of the piece of paper on which I’d copied the address for Jacob Marcus who was really Isaac Moritz. Under a report card, I found an old letter from Misha, one of his first.
Dear Alma
, it said.
How are you knowing me so well? I think we are like two peas in a pod. It is true I like John more than Paul. But I have large respect for Ringo too.

Saturday morning I printed a map and the directions off the internet, and told my mother I was going to Misha’s house for the day. Then I walked up the street and knocked on the Coopers’ door. Herman came out with his hair sticking up, wearing a Sex Pistols T-shirt. “Whoa,” he said when he saw me. He stepped back from the door. “Do you want to go for a ride?” I asked. “Is this a joke?” “No.” “Oookaay,” said Herman. “Hold, please.” He went upstairs to ask his father for the keys, and when he came down he’d wet his hair and changed into a fresh blue T-shirt.

17.
LOOK AT ME

“Where are we going, Canada?” Herman asked when he saw the map. There was a pale band around his wrist where his watch had been all summer. “Connecticut,” I said. “Only if you take off that hood,” he said. “Why?” “I can’t see your face.” I pushed it off. He smiled at me. There was still sleep in the corner of his eye. A drop of rain rolled down his forehead. I read him the directions and we talked about the colleges he was applying to for next year. He told me he was considering a major in marine biology because he wanted to live a life like Jacques Cousteau. I thought maybe we had more in common than I’d originally thought. He asked me what I wanted to become and I said I’d briefly considered paleontology, and then he asked me what a paleontologist did, so I told him if he took a complete, illustrated guide to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, shredded it into a hundred pieces, cast them into the wind from the museum’s steps, etc., and then he asked me why I’d changed my mind, and I told him I thought I wasn’t cut out for it, so he asked me what I thought I was cut out for, and I said, “It’s a long story,” so he said, “I have time,” so I said, “You really want to know?” and he said Yes, so I told him the truth, beginning with my father’s Swiss Army knife and the book of
Edible Plants and Flowers in North America
, and ending with my plans to one day explore the Arctic wilderness with nothing but what I could carry on my back. “I wish you wouldn’t,” he said. Then we took a wrong exit and stopped at a gas station to ask for directions and buy some SweetTarts. “These are on me,” Herman said when I took out my wallet to pay. When he handed a five-dollar bill across the counter, his hands were shaking.

18.
I TOLD HIM THE WHOLE STORY ABOUT
THE HISTORY OF LOVE

It was raining so hard that we had to pull over to the side of the road. I took my sneakers off and put my feet up on the dashboard. Herman wrote my name in the fog on the windshield. Then we reminisced about a water fight we’d had a hundred years ago, and I felt a pang of sadness that next year Herman would be gone to start his life.

19.
I JUST DO

After looking forever, we finally found the dirt road to Isaac Moritz’s house. We must have driven past it two or three times without noticing it. I’d been ready to give up, but Herman wouldn’t. My palms started to sweat as we drove up the muddy drive because I’d never met a famous writer before, and definitely not one I’d forged a letter to. The numbers of Isaac Moritz’s address were nailed to a big maple tree. “How do you know it’s a maple?” Herman asked. “I just do,” I said, sparing him the details. Then I saw the lake. Herman pulled up to the house and turned off the car. Suddenly it was very quiet. I leaned down to tie my sneakers. When I sat up he was looking at me. His face was hopeful and unbelieving and also a little sad, and I wondered if it was anything like my father’s face when he looked at my mother all those years ago at the Dead Sea, setting in motion a train of events that had finally brought me here, to the middle of nowhere, with a boy I’d grown up with but hardly knew.

20.
SHALLON, SHALLOP, SHALLOT, SHALLOW

I got out of the car and took a deep breath.

I thought, My name is Alma Singer you don’t know me but I was named after your mother.

21.
SHALOM, SHAM, SHAMAN, SHAMBLE

I knocked on the door. There was no answer. I rang the bell, but there was still no answer, so I walked around the house and looked into the windows. It was dark inside. When I came back around to the front, Herman was leaning against the car with his arms crossed over his chest.

22.
I DECIDED THERE WAS NOTHING LEFT TO LOSE

We sat together on the porch of Isaac Moritz’s house, swinging on a bench and watching the rain. I asked Herman if he’d ever heard of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and when he said no I asked him if he’d ever heard of
The Little Prince
and he said he thought he had. So I told him about the time Saint-Ex crashed in the Libyan desert, drank the dew off the airplane’s wings which he’d gathered with an oil-stained rag, and walked hundreds of miles, dehydrated and delirious from the heat and cold. When I got to the part about how he was found by some Bedouins, Herman slipped his hand into mine, and I thought, An average of seventy-four species become extinct every day, which was one good reason but not the only one to hold someone’s hand, and the next thing that happened was we kissed each other, and I found I knew how, and I felt happy and sad in equal parts, because I knew that I was falling in love, but it wasn’t with him.

We waited a long time, but Isaac never came. I didn’t know what else to do, so I left a note on the door with my telephone number.

A week and a half later—I remember the date, October 5th—my mother was reading the newspaper and she said, “Remember that writer you asked me about, Isaac Moritz?” and I said, “Yes,” and she said, “There’s an obituary for him in the paper.”

That evening I went up to her study. She had five chapters left of
The History of Love
, and she didn’t know that now she wasn’t translating them for anyone but me.

“Mom?” I said. She turned. “Can I talk to you about something?”

“Of course, darling. Come here.”

I took a few steps into the room. There was so much I wanted to say.

“I need you to be—” I said, and then I started to cry.

“Be what?” she said, opening her arms.

“Not sad,” I said.

ONE NICE THING

September 28