The History of Love (22 page)

I reached the library, my face lashed by rain. Water dripped from my nose. The beast my umbrella was shattered, so I discarded it in the stand. I made my way to the librarian’s desk. Scamper, stop and pant, hike up trouser legs, step, drag, step, drag, etcetera. The librarian’s chair was vacant. I quote unquote hurried around the reading room. Finally I found someone. She was reshelving. I had difficulty restraining myself.

I’d like everything you have by the writer Leo Gursky
! I shouted.

She turned to look at me. So did everyone else.

Excuse me?

Everything you have by the writer Leo Gursky,
I repeated.

I’m in the middle of something. You’ll have to wait a minute.

I waited a minute.

Leo Gursky
, I said.
G-U-R-

She shoved her cart along.
I know how to spell it.

I followed her to the computer. She typed in my name. My heart raced. I may be old. But. My heart can still get it up.

There’s a book about bullfighting by a Leonard Gursky,
she said.

Not him
, I said.
What about a Leopold?

Leopold, Leopold,
she said.
Here it is.

I clutched the nearest stable object. Drumroll, please:

The Incredible, Fantastic Adventures of Frankie, Toothless Girl Wonder,
she said, and grinned. I fought the urge to smack her over the head with my galosh. Off she went for the book in the children’s section. I didn’t stop her. Instead I died a little death. She sat me down with it.
Enjoy
, she said.

Once Bruno said that if I bought a pigeon,
halfway down the street it would become a dove, on the bus home a parrot, and in my apartment, the moment before I took it out of the cage, a phoenix.
That’s you,
he said,
brushing some crumbs that weren’t there from the table. A few minutes passed.
No it’s not,
I said. He shrugged and looked out the window.
Whoever heard of a phoenix
? I said.
A peacock, maybe. But a phoenix I don’t think so.
His face was turned away but I thought I saw his mouth twitch in a smile.

But now I couldn’t do anything to turn the nothing the librarian had found into something.

In the days after my heart attack and before I began to write again, all I could think about was dying. I’d been spared again, and only after the danger had passed did I allow my thoughts to unravel to their inevitable end. I imagined all the ways I could go. Blood clot to the brain. Infarction. Thrombosis. Pneumonia. Grand mal obstruction to the vena cava. I saw myself foaming at the mouth, writhing on the floor. I’d wake up in the night, gripping my throat. And yet. No matter how often I imagined the possible failure of my organs, I found the consequence inconceivable. That it could happen to me. I forced myself to picture the last moments. The penultimate breath. A final sigh. And yet. It was always followed by another.

I remember the first time I understood what it was to die. I was nine. My uncle, my father’s brother, may his memory be a blessing, died in his sleep. There was no explanation. A huge, strapping man who ate like a horse and went out in the freezing cold to break blocks of ice with his bare hands. Gone, kaput. He used to call me Leopo. He said it like this:
Lay-o-po.
Behind my aunt’s back he would sneak me and my cousins a cube of sugar. He used to do an imitation of Stalin that could make your sides split.

My aunt found him in the morning, the body already stiff. Three men were needed to carry him to the
khevra kadisha
. My brother and I slipped in to behold the great heap. The body was more remarkable to us in death than it had been in life—the forest of fur on the back of his hands, the flat yellowed nails, the thick rime on the soles of his feet. He seemed so human. And yet. Horribly not. Once I came in to bring my father a glass of tea. He was sitting with the body, which couldn’t be left alone for even a minute.
I have to go to the bathroom
, he told me.
Wait here until I come back.
Before I could protest that I hadn’t even been Bar Mitzvahed, he rushed out to relieve himself. The next few minutes passed like hours. My uncle was laid out on a slab of stone the color of raw meat with white veins. Once I thought I saw his chest rise a fraction and almost shrieked. But. It wasn’t only him I was afraid of. I was afraid for myself. In that cold room, I sensed my own death. In the corner was a sink with cracked tiles. Down that drain had gone all the clipped nails, hairs, and grains of dirt washed from the dead. The faucet had a leak, and with every drip I felt my life ebbing away. One day it would be all gone. The joy of being alive became so concentrated in me I wanted to scream. I was never a religious child. But. Suddenly I felt the need to beg God to spare me as long as possible. When my father came back he found his son on his knees on the floor, with eyes squeezed shut and knuckles white.

From then on, I was terrified that I or one of my parents were going to die. My mother worried me the most. She was the force around which our world turned. Unlike our father, who spent his life in the clouds, my mother was propelled through the universe by the brute force of reason. She was the judge in all of our arguments. One disapproving word from her was enough to send us off to hide in a corner, where we would cry and fantasize our own martyrdom. And yet. One kiss could restore us to princedom. Without her, our lives would dissolve into chaos.

The fear of death haunted me for a year. I cried whenever anyone dropped a glass or broke a plate. But even when that passed, I was left with a sadness that couldn’t be rubbed off. It wasn’t that something new had happened. It was worse: I’d become aware of what had been with me all along without my notice. I dragged this new awareness around like a stone tied to my ankle. Wherever I went, it followed. I used to make up little sad songs in my head. I eulogized the falling leaves. I imagined my death in a hundred different ways, but the funeral was always the same: from somewhere in my imagination, out rolled a red carpet. Because after every secret death I died, my greatness was always discovered.

Things might have gone on like that.

One morning, having wasted time over my breakfast and then stopped to examine Mrs. Stanislawski’s giant underwear drying on the line, I was late to school. The bell had rung, but a girl in my class was kneeling in the dusty schoolyard. Her hair was braided down her back. She was cupping her hands around something. I asked her what it was.
I caught a moth
, she said, without looking at me.
What do you want with a moth?
I asked.
What kind of question is that?
she said. I rethought my question.
Well if it was a butterfly that would be one thing,
I said.
No it wouldn’t,
she said.
It would be another
thing. You should let it go
, I said.
It’s a very rare moth,
she said.
How do you know?
I asked.
I have a feeling,
she said
.
I pointed out that the bell had already rung.
Then go in,
she said
. No one’s stopping you
.
Not unless you let it go. Then you might have to wait forever
.

She opened the space between her thumbs and looked in.
Let me see,
I said. She didn’t say anything.
Can I please see it?
She looked at me. Her eyes were green and sharp.
All right. But be careful
. She lifted her clasped hands to my face and parted her two thumbs a half inch. I could smell the soap on her skin. All I could see was a little bit of brown wing, so I pulled on her thumb to get a better look. And yet. She must have thought I was trying to free the moth, because suddenly she clapped her hands shut. We looked at each other in horror. When she peeled her hands apart again, the moth jumped feebly in her palm. One wing had come off. She made a little gasp.
I didn’t do it
, I said. When I looked at her eyes, I saw they were filled with tears. A feeling I didn’t yet know was longing clenched my stomach.
I’m sorry,
I whispered. I felt an urge to hug her, to kiss away the moth and the broken wing. She said nothing. Our eyes were locked in a stare.

It was as if we shared a guilty secret. I’d seen her every day in school, and never felt anything particular for her before. If anything, I found her bossy. She could be charming. But. She was a poor loser. More than once she’d refused to talk to me on the rare occasions when I managed to answer one of the teacher’s trivia questions faster than her.
The King of England is George!
I’d shout, and for the rest of the day I’d have to defend myself against her icy silence.

But now she seemed different to me. I became aware of her special powers. How she seemed to pull light and gravity to the place where she stood. I noticed, as I had never before, the way her toes pointed slightly inward. The dirt on her bare knees. The way her coat fit neatly across her narrow shoulders. As if my eyes had been given magnifying powers, I saw her more closely yet. The black beauty mark, like a fleck of ink above her lip. The pink, translucent shell of her ear. The blond down on her cheeks. Inch by inch she revealed herself to me. I half expected that in another moment I’d be able to make out the cells of her skin as if under a microscope, and a thought crossed my mind that had to do with the familiar worry that I’d inherited too much from my father. But it didn’t last long, because at the same time that I was becoming conscious of her body, I was becoming aware of my own. The sensation almost knocked the breath out of me. A tingling feeling caught fire in my nerves and spread. The whole thing must have happened in less than thirty seconds. And yet. When it was over, I’d been initiated into the mystery that stands at the beginning of the end of childhood. It was years before I’d spent all the joy and pain born in me in that less than half a minute.

Without another word, she dropped the broken moth and ran inside. The heavy iron door swung closed behind her with a thud.

Alma.

It’s been a long time since I uttered that name.

I resolved to make her love me, whatever the cost. But. I knew enough not to attack right away. I watched her every move for the next couple of weeks. Patience had always been one of my virtues. Once I hid for four whole hours under the outhouse behind the rabbi’s house to find out if the famous
tzaddik
who’d come to visit from Baranowicze really took shits like the rest of us. The answer was yes. In my enthusiasm for the coarse miracles of life, I shot out from under the outhouse shouting an affirmative. For this I got five raps on the knuckles and had to kneel on corncobs until my knees were bloody. But. It was worth it.

I considered myself a spy infiltrating an alien world: the domain of the female. With the excuse of gathering evidence, I stole Mrs. Stanislawski’s enormous panties off the clothesline. Alone in the outhouse, I sniffed them with abandon. I buried my face in the crotch. I put them on my head. I raised them and let them balloon in the breeze like the flag of a new nation. When my mother pushed open the door, I was trying them on for size. They could have fit three of me.

With one lethal look—and the humiliating punishment of having to knock on Stanislawski’s door and hand back her underwear—my mother put an end to the general portion of my research. And yet. I continued in the specific. There, my research was exhaustive. I found out that Alma was the youngest of four children, and her father’s favorite. I knew her birthday was the twenty-first of February (making her older than me by five months and twenty-eight days), that she loved the sour cherries in syrup that were smuggled from across the border in Russia, and that once she had consumed half a jar of these in secret, and when her mother found out she made her eat the other half, thinking it would make her sick and turn her off the cherries forever. But it didn’t. She ate the whole thing up and even claimed to a girl in our class that she could have eaten more. I knew that her father wanted her to learn how to play the piano, but that she wanted to learn the violin, and that this dispute remained unsettled, with both sides standing their ground, until Alma got hold of an empty violin case (she claimed to have found it discarded by the road) and started carrying it around in her father’s presence, sometimes even pretending to play the phantom violin, and that this was the straw that broke the camel’s back, her father caved in and arranged for a violin to be brought back from Vilna by one of her brothers who was studying at the
Gymnasium
, and the new violin arrived in a shiny black leather case lined with purple velvet, and that every song Alma learned to play on it, no matter how sad, possessed the unmistakable tone of victory. I knew because I heard her play while I stood outside her window, waiting for the secret to her heart to be revealed to me with the same ardor with which I’d waited for the great
tzaddik
’s shit.