The History of Love (31 page)

The doorman had been talking, but now he stopped. “Are you OK?” he asked. “Finethankyou,” I said, even though I wasn’t. “You want to sit down or something?” I shook my head. I don’t know why, but I thought of the time Dad took me to see the penguins at the zoo, lifting me up onto his shoulders in the dank and fishy cold so I could press my face against the glass and watch them get fed, and how he taught me to pronounce the word
Antarctica.
Then I wondered if it ever really happened.

Because there was nothing left to say, I said, “Have you ever heard of a book called
The History of Love
?” The doorman shrugged and shook his head. “If you want to talk about books, you should talk to the son.” “Alma’s son?” “Sure. Isaac. He still comes in sometimes.” “Isaac?” “Isaac Moritz. Famous writer. You didn’t know that was their son? Sure, he still uses the place when he’s in town. You want to leave a message?” he asked. “No, thank you,” I said, because I’d never heard of any Isaac Moritz.

8.
UNCLE JULIAN

That evening, Uncle Julian ordered a beer for himself and a mango lassi for me, and said, “I know sometimes things are hard with Mum.” “She misses Dad,” I said, which was like pointing out that a skyscraper is tall. Uncle Julian nodded. “I know you didn’t know your grandpa. In lots of ways he was very wonderful. But he was also a difficult man. Controlling would be a nice word for it. He had very strict rules about how your mum and I should live.” The reason I didn’t know my grandfather very well was because he died of old age while on holiday at a hotel in Bournemouth a few years after I was born. “Charlotte got the brunt of it since she was the eldest and a girl. I think that’s why she’s always refused to tell you and Bird what to do or how to do it.” “Except for our manners,” I pointed out. “No, she doesn’t restrain herself on the subject of manners, does she? I suppose what I’m trying to say is that I know she may seem distant sometimes. She has her own things she needs to work out. Missing your dad is one. Arguing against her own father is another. But you know how much she loves you, Al, don’t you?” I nodded. The way Uncle Julian smiled was always a little lopsided, with one side of his mouth curling up higher than the other, as if part of him refused to cooperate with the rest. “Well, then,” he said, and raised his glass. “To you turning fifteen, and to me finishing this bloody book.”

We clicked glasses. Then he told me the story about how he fell in love with Alberto Giacometti when he was twenty-five. “How did you fall in love with Aunt Frances?” I asked. “Ah,” said Uncle Julian, and mopped his forehead, which was shiny and damp. He was going a little bald, but in a handsome way. “You really want to know?” “Yes.” “She was wearing blue tights.” “What do you mean?” “I saw her at the zoo in front of the chimpanzee cage, and she was wearing bright blue tights. And I thought: That’s the girl I’m going to marry.” “Because of her tights?” “Yes. The light was shining on her in a very nice way. And she was completely transfixed by this one chimp. But if it hadn’t been for the tights, I don’t think I would have ever gone up to her.” “Do you ever think about what would have happened if she’d decided not to wear those tights that day?” “All the time,” said Uncle Julian. “I might have been a much happier man.” I pushed the tikka masala around on my plate. “But probably not,” he said. “What if you would have been?” I asked. Julian sighed. “Once I start to think about it, it’s hard to imagine any kind of anything—happiness or otherwise—without her. I’ve lived with Frances for so long that I can’t imagine what life would look or feel like with another person.” “Like Flo?” I said. Uncle Julian choked on his food. “How do you know about Flo?” “I found the letter you started in the trash bin.” His face turned red. I looked up at the map of India on the wall. Every fourteen-year-old should know the exact location of Calcutta. It wouldn’t do to go around without the faintest clue of where Calcutta was. “I see,” said Uncle Julian. “Well, Flo is a colleague of mine at the Courtauld. And she’s a good friend, and Frances has always been a little jealous of that. There are certain things— How to say this, Al? OK. Let me give you an example. Can I give you an example?” “OK.” “There’s a self-portrait by Rembrandt. It’s at Kenwood House, very close to where we live. We took you there when you were little. Do you remember?” “No.” “Doesn’t matter. The point is, it’s one of my favorite paintings. I go to see it quite a lot. I start off on a walk on the Heath, and then I find myself there. It’s one of the last self-portraits he did. He painted it sometime between 1665 and when he died four years later, bankrupt and alone. Whole stretches of the canvas are bare. There’s a hurried intensity in the strokes—you can see where he scratched into the wet paint with the end of the brush. It’s as if he knew there wasn’t much time left. And yet, there’s a serenity in his face, a sense of something that’s survived its own ruin.” I slid down in the booth and swung my foot, accidentally kicking Uncle Julian’s leg. “What does it have to do with Aunt Frances and Flo?” I asked. For a moment Uncle Julian looked lost. “I really don’t know,” he said. He mopped his forehead again, and called for the check. We sat in silence. Uncle Julian’s mouth twitched. He took a twenty out of his wallet and folded it into a tiny square, then folded that into an even smaller square. Then very quickly he said, “Fran couldn’t give two shits about that painting,” and put his empty beer glass to his lips.

“If you want to know, I don’t think you’re a dog,” I said. Uncle Julian smiled. “Can I ask you a question?” I said, while the waiter went back for his change. “Of course.” “Did Mom and Dad ever fight?” “I suppose they did. Certainly, sometimes. No more than anyone else.” “Do you think Dad would have wanted Mom to fall in love again?” Uncle Julian gave me one of his lopsided smiles. “I do,” he said. “I think he would have wanted that very much.”

9.
MERDE

When we got home, my mother was out in the backyard. Through the window I saw her kneeling in a pair of muddy overalls, planting flowers in what little light was left. I pushed open the screen door. The dead leaves and the weeds that had been growing for years had been torn out and cleared away, and four black trash bags stood by the iron garden bench that no one ever sat on. “What are you doing?” I called. “Planting mums and asters,” she said. “Why?” “I was in the mood.” “Why were you in the mood?” “I sent off some more chapters this afternoon, so I thought I’d do something relaxing.” “
What?
” “I said, I sent off some more chapters to Jacob Marcus, so I thought I’d relax a bit,” she repeated. I couldn’t believe it. “You sent the chapters yourself? But you always give me everything to take to the post office!” “Sorry. I didn’t know it meant so much to you. Anyway, you were gone all day. And I wanted to get it off. So I just did it myself.”
DID IT YOURSELF?
I wanted to shout. My mother, her own species, dropped a flower into a hole and started to fill it with dirt. She turned and looked at me over her shoulder. “Dad used to love to garden,” she said, as if I’d never known him at all.

10.
MEMORIES PASSED DOWN TO ME FROM MY MOTHER

11.
HOW TO RESTORE A HEARTBEAT

Chapters 1 through 28 of
The History of Love
sat in a pile by my mother’s computer. I searched the garbage bin, but there were no drafts of the letters she’d sent to Marcus. All I found was a crumpled paper that said:
Back in Paris, Alberto began to have second thoughts.

12.
I GAVE UP

That was the end of my search to find someone that would make my mother happy again. I finally understood that no matter what I did, or who I found, I—he—none of us—would ever be able to win over the memories she had of Dad, memories that soothed her even while they made her sad, because she’d built a world out of them she knew how to survive in, even if no one else could.

I couldn’t sleep that night. I knew Bird was awake, too, by the sound of his breathing. I wanted to ask him about the thing he was building in the vacant lot, and how he knew he was a
lamed vovnik
, and to tell him I was sorry about shouting at him the time he wrote on my notebook. I wanted to say that I was scared, for him and for me, and I wanted to tell him the truth about all the lies I’d been telling him all these years. I whispered his name. “Yeah?” he whispered back. I lay in the dark and the silence, which was nothing like the dark and the silence my father lay in as a boy in a house on a dirt street in Tel Aviv, or the dark and the silence my mother lay in on her first night at Kibbutz Yavne, but which held those darknesses and those silences, too. I tried to think of what it was I wanted to say. “I’m not awake,” I finally said. “Me either,” said Bird.

Later, after Bird finally fell asleep, I turned on my flashlight and read some more of
The History of Love
. I thought about how, if I read it closely enough, I might find out something true about my father, and the things he would have wanted to tell me if he hadn’t died.

The next morning I woke up early. I heard Bird moving around above me. When I opened my eyes he was pushing the sheets into a ball, and the seat of his pajamas was wet.

13.
THEN IT WAS SEPTEMBER

And summer was over, and Misha and I were officially not speaking, and no more letters arrived from Jacob Marcus, and Uncle Julian announced that he was going back to London to try to work things out with Aunt Frances. The night before he left for the airport and I started tenth grade, he knocked on my door. “That thing I said about Frances and the Rembrandt,” he said when I let him in. “Can we pretend I never said it?” “Said what?” I said. He smiled, showing the gap between his front teeth that we both inherited from my grandmother. “Thanks,” he said. “Hey, I got you something.” He handed me a large envelope. “What is it?” “Open it.” Inside was a catalogue for an art school in the city. I looked up at him. “Go on, read it.” I opened the cover, and a piece of paper fluttered to the floor. Uncle Julian stooped and picked it up. “Here,” he said, mopping his forehead. It was a registration form. On it was my name, and the name of a class called “Drawing from Life.”
“There’s a card, too,” he said. I reached inside the envelope. It was a postcard of a Rembrandt self-portrait. On the back it said:
Dear Al, Wittgenstein once wrote that when the eye sees something beautiful, the hand wants to draw it.
I wish I could draw you. Happy early birthday. Love, your Uncle Julian.

THE LAST PAGE

I
n the beginning it was easy. Litvinoff pretended to be just passing time, doodling in an absentminded way while he listened to the radio, just as his students did while he lectured in class. One thing he did not do was sit down at the drafting table onto which the most important of all Jewish prayers had been carved by his landlady’s son, and think to himself: I am going to plagiarize my friend who was murdered by the Nazis. Nor did he think: If she thinks I wrote this, she will love me. He simply copied the first page, which, naturally,
led to copying the second.