The History of Love (19 page)

I’m making it sound worse than it is. I don’t even know you yet, and I’m already fishing for sympathy.

You also asked what I do. I read. This morning I finished
The Street of Crocodiles
for the third time. I found it almost unbearably beautiful.

Also, I watch movies. My brother got me a DVD player. You wouldn’t believe how many movies I’ve watched in the last month. That’s what I do. Watch movies and read. Sometimes I even pretend to write, but I’m not fooling anyone. Oh, and I go to the mailbox.

Enough. I loved your book. Please send me some more.

JM

10.
I READ THE LETTER ONE HUNDRED TIMES

And each time I read it, I felt I knew a little less about Jacob Marcus. He said he spent the morning looking for a rock, but he never said anything more about why
The History of Love
was so important to him. Of course it didn’t escape me that he’d written:
I don’t even know you
yet
.
Yet! Meaning he was expecting to get to know us better, or at least our mother, since he didn’t know about Bird and me. (Yet!) But why could he hardly walk to the mailbox and back? And why would it take an unusual woman to keep him company? And why was he wearing a Russian astronaut on his lapel?

I decided to make a list of clues. I went home, closed my bedroom door, and took out the third volume of
How to Survive in the Wild
. I turned to a new page. I decided to write everything in code, in case anyone decided to snoop around in my things. I remembered Saint-Ex. At the top I wrote
How to Survive if Your Parachute Fails to Open
. Then I wrote:

1. Search for a stone

2. Live near a lake

3. Have a gardener with a limp

4. Read The Street of Crocodiles

5. Need an unusual woman

6. Have trouble just walking to the mailbox

Those were all the clues I could come up with from his letter, so I snuck into my mother’s study while she was downstairs and got his other letters out of her desk drawer. I read these for more clues. That’s when I remembered that his first letter began with a quote from my mother’s introduction about Nicanor Parra, the one about how he wore a little Russian astronaut on his lapel and carried in his pockets the letters of a woman who left him for another. When Jacob Marcus wrote that he also wore a Russian astronaut, did it mean that his wife had left him for someone else? Because I wasn’t sure, I didn’t put this down as a clue. Instead I wrote:

7. Take a trip to Venice

8. A long time ago, have someone read to you from The History of Love while you’re falling asleep.

9. Never forget it.

I looked over my clues. None of them helped.

11.
HOW I AM

I decided that if I really wanted to find out who Jacob Marcus was, and why it was so important to him to have the book translated, the only place left to look was
The History of Love.

I snuck upstairs to my mother’s study, to see if I could print the chapters she’d translated off her computer. The only problem was that she was sitting in front of it. “Hello,” she said. “Hello,” I said, trying to sound casual. “How are you?” she asked. “Finethank-youhowareyou?” I answered, because that’s what she taught me to say, as well as how to hold my knife and fork properly, how to balance a teacup between two fingers, and the best way to dig out a piece of food between my teeth without drawing attention to myself, on the off chance that the Queen happened to invite me for high tea. When I pointed out that no one I know holds their knife and fork properly, she looked unhappy and said she was trying to be a good mother, and if she didn’t teach me, who would? I wish she hadn’t, though, because sometimes being polite is worse than being not-polite, like the time Greg Feldman passed me in the hall at school and said, “Hey, Alma, what’s up?” and I said, “Finethankyouhowareyou?” and he stopped and gave me a look like I’d just parachuted down from Mars, and said, “Why can’t you ever just say,
Not much
?”

12.
NOT MUCH

It got dark out, and my mother said there was nothing to eat in the house, and did we want to order some Thai food, or maybe West Indian, or how about Cambodian. “Why can’t we cook?” I asked. “Macaroni and cheese?” my mother asked. “Mrs. Shklovsky makes a very good Chicken L’Orange,” I said. My mother looked doubtful. “Chili?” I said. While she was at the supermarket, I went up to her study and printed out chapters one through fifteen of
The History of Love
, which was as far as she’d gotten. I took the pages downstairs and hid them in my survival backpack under the bed. A few minutes later my mother came home with one pound of ground turkey, one head of broccoli, three apples, a jar of pickles, and a box of marzipan imported from Spain.

13.
THE ETERNAL DISAPPOINTMENT OF LIFE AS IT IS

After a dinner of microwaved fake-meat chicken nuggets, I went to bed early and read what my mother had translated of
The History of Love
under the covers by flashlight. There was the chapter about how people used to talk with their hands, and the chapter about the man who thought he was made of glass, and a chapter I hadn’t read called “The Birth of Feeling.”
Feelings are not as old as time,
it began.

Just as there was a first instant when someone rubbed two sticks together to make a spark, there was a first time joy was felt, and a first time for sadness. For a while, new feelings were being invented all the time. Desire was born early, as was regret. When stubbornness was felt for the first time, it started a chain reaction, creating the feeling of resentment on the one hand, and alienation and loneliness on the other. It might have been a certain counterclockwise movement of the hips that marked the birth of ecstasy; a bolt of lightning that caused the first feeling of awe. Or maybe it was the body of a girl named Alma. Contrary to logic, the feeling of surprise wasn’t born immediately. It only came after people had enough time to get used to things as they were. And when enough time
had
passed, and someone felt the first feeling of surprise, someone, somewhere else, felt the first pang of nostalgia.

It’s also true that sometimes people felt things and, because there was no word for them, they went unmentioned. The oldest emotion in the world may be that of being moved; but to describe it—just to name it—must have been like trying to catch something invisible.

(Then again, the oldest feeling in the world might simply have been confusion.)

Having begun to feel, people’s desire to feel grew. They wanted to feel more, feel deeper, despite how much it sometimes hurt. People became addicted to feeling. They struggled to uncover new emotions. It’s possible that this is how art was born. New kinds of joy were forged, along with new kinds of sadness: The eternal disappointment of life as it is; the relief of unexpected reprieve; the fear of dying.

Even now, all possible feelings do not yet exist. There are still those that lie beyond our capacity and our imagination. From time to time, when a piece of music no one has ever written, or a painting no one has ever painted, or something else impossible to predict, fathom, or yet describe takes place, a new feeling enters the world. And then, for the millionth time in the history of feeling, the heart surges, and absorbs the impact.

All of the chapters were sort of like this, and none of them really told me anything about why the book was so important to Jacob Marcus. Instead I found myself thinking about my father. About how much
The History of Love
must have meant to him if he gave it to my mother only two weeks after they met, even though he knew she couldn’t read Spanish yet. Why? Because he was falling in love with her, of course.

Then I thought of something else. What if my father had written something inside the copy of
The History of Love
he gave to my mother? It hadn’t ever occurred to me to look.

I got out of bed and went upstairs. Mom’s study was empty and the book was next to her computer. I lifted it up and opened to the title page. In handwriting I didn’t recognize, it said:
For Charlotte, my Alma. This is the book I would have written for you if I could write. Love, David

I went back to bed and thought about my father, and those twenty words, for a long time.

And then I started to think about her. Alma. Who was she? My mother would say she was everyone, every girl and every woman that anyone ever loved. But the more I thought about it, the more I thought that she also must have been
someone
. Because how could Litvinoff have written so much about love without being in love himself? With someone in particular. And that someone must have been named—

Under the nine clues I’d already written, I added one more:

10. Alma

14.
THE BIRTH OF FEELING

I raced down to the kitchen, but it was empty. Outside the window, in the middle of our backyard overgrown and full of weeds, was my mother. I pushed open the screen door. “Alma,” I said, catching my breath. “Hmm?” my mother said. She was holding a gardening trowel. I didn’t have time to stop and think about why she was holding a gardening trowel since it was my father, not her, who’d gardened, and since it was already nine-thirty at night. “What’s her last name?” I asked. “What are you talking about?” my mother said. “Alma,” I said impatiently. “The girl in the book. What’s her last name?” My mother wiped her forehead, leaving a smear of dirt. “Actually, now that you mention it—one of the chapters does mention a surname. But it’s strange, because while all the other names in the book are Spanish, her surname is—” My mother frowned. “What?” I said, excited. “Hers is what?” “Mereminski,” my mother said. “Mereminski,” I repeated. She nodded. “M-E-R-E-M-I-N-S-K-I. Mereminski. Polish. It’s one of the few clues Litvinoff left about where he came from.”

I ran back upstairs, climbed into bed, turned on my flashlight, and opened the third volume of
How to Survive in the Wild.
Next to
Alma,
I wrote
Mereminski.

The next day, I started to look for her.

THE TROUBLE WITH THINKING

I
f Litvinoff coughed more and more as the years passed—a hacking cough that shook his whole body, causing him to bend over double, and made it necessary for him to excuse himself from dinner tables, refuse phone calls, and turn down the occasional invitation to speak—it wasn’t so much because he was ill, as that there was something he wished to say. The more time passed, the more he longed to say it, and the more impossible saying it became. Sometimes he woke in a panic from his dreams.
Rosa!
he’d shout
.
But before the words were out of his mouth he’d feel her hand on his chest, and at the sound of her voice—
What is it?
What’s wrong, sweetheart?
—he’d lose his courage, overcome with fear of the consequences. And so instead of saying what he wanted to say, he said:
It’s nothing. Just a bad dream,
and waited for her to fall back asleep before pushing off the covers and stepping out to the balcony.