For once he kept his mouth shut. He didn’t try to prove to her that he knew what he cared about. He couldn’t. Had he opened his mouth, he might have confessed that all he cared about right now was not making a fool of himself any more than he already had, not watching her recede out the door, across the courtyard, past the man packing up his Zionists = Nazis poster outside the windows, and away into the city—the last glimpse of her he’d ever catch.
He said—had he ever said this to a woman, and was it as much of a cliché as he feared it was?—“Tell me more.” And then listened, or tried to. When she turned her sharp, teasing questions on him, he answered as carefully as though he’d been wired to a polygraph machine. Because he knew, somehow, that to be glib with Marisa would bring an end to the conversation once and for all.
An hour later they were in her room, their bodies a slow, winding tangle on the sheets.
It was impossible for him to pinpoint, after, what was different. He looked at her body, and at his own, and his chest caught as though on a hook. Something in the room had changed. The floor of her dormitory room was still strewn with items yet to be added to her half-packed suitcases—but the light from the small window above her bed had melded with the glow of her skin and the golden sounds of the sliding sheets and the bright heart-pounding world outside, as though some unspeakably precious substance were being fused, and the only words that came to him—words like holy, like sacred—belonged to things he didn’t believe in.
Their bodies were at an angle: her muscled calves cantilevered on Aaron’s long shins, her body reclining against the wall in an echo he couldn’t resist, and he confessed, “I saw your portrait.”
Marisa laughed. Her face was to the ceiling; he saw it in profile.
“Did it turn you on?” she asked. “People say that.”
He didn’t trust himself to speak. He prepared an enigmatic smile, which she did not turn her head to see.
People.
How many people?
“Rodney’s the man,” she said. And yawned, and kicked her legs into the air and rocked her trim body forward, hopping off the bed in a smooth motion and crossing to the bathroom.
The man. He almost laughed at the unfairness of the expression, an expression that, from her, could mean anything. And did people mean women, too? It seemed possible, anything seemed possible. Or did people simply mean besotted fools like him . . . a guy who thought the earth had moved even though Marisa apparently had not been left weak-kneed by what they’d just done on her gold-lit, rumpled bed? Maybe it meant fools whose dissertation topics weren’t invitations to disaster, who didn’t tighten their pecs when naked in front of her—in short, who were possibly (was it possible?) not intimidated by Marisa.
She returned with two glasses of tap water.
How was it that no gesture of hers could be servile? That she could bring him water naked, after they’d made love on her blanketless bed in her half-packed dormitory room, and he’d accept it from her knowing that he, and only he, was the barefoot supplicant.
Before they’d parted, while they still sat naked side by side on the bed, she’d set her water glass on the floor and taken his chin in her palm.
He met her gaze and tried not to blink.
“When I fall for someone,” she said, “it’s absolute and immediate.” Her gaze wasn’t ungentle—but neither did she seem worried about his feelings. She looked at him with the directness of someone making an inner calculus over which he was to have no influence. “Or else I know, absolutely and immediately, that I have no interest.”
He didn’t allow himself to duck her eyes.
“With you I’m not sure.” She released his chin but didn’t drop her gaze. “There’s something about you that makes me hesitate.”
A moment passed. Then Marisa’s expression eased, and she offered him a smile of unexpected softness. “I’m not used to hesitating,” she said.
He sat now at the table, hunched against the cold, his screen blanched in the window’s light. Then he looked at the header on Marisa’s e-mail and saw that she had written it only eleven minutes before—early evening, Israel time. If he hurried he might catch her.
Thanks for your note, Marisa, he typed. I’m glad my lecture didn’t make you run for the hills.
The taste of beer came back to him, the smell of the dimly lit pub, the feel of her slap on his cheek. With a focus that had eluded him at the time, he now recalled bits of their conversation at the bar. Marisa seated, her sandaled feet tucked behind a rung of the high stool; he standing, beer in hand. There had been an instant—hadn’t there?—when something shifted. He was almost certain now that he remembered it. Just before Marisa straightened and took his hand, and led him away from the pub to her bedroom. There’d been some kind of segue—a story Marisa related about her gay brother, before shaking her adamant mood with a laugh—but Aaron didn’t rack his memory for its details now because the arrow of memory had already carried him beyond it and straight to what he needed. Why hadn’t he recalled this part of their discussion before? Marisa saying something disparaging about American Jews, and Aaron asking what Marisa had against them, given that she was one. And then Marisa had looked right at him, her forehead furrowing—and then, in a conspiratorial flash, she’d seemed to decide that something about Aaron might be worth taking a flyer. “No offense,” she mock-whispered. She rested one hand lightly on his forearm; he felt its warmth through his rolled sleeve. “American Jews are naive. They don’t want memory, or history that might make them uncomfortable, they just want to be liked. Being liked is their . . . sugar rush.” She sat back, lifting away her hand. The ghost of its warmth remained on Aaron’s skin. “American Jews are addicted to sugar,” she pronounced, “and to being liked.” Aaron could only laugh at the beery neatness of this declaration, but Marisa’s eyes tightened as though his amusement displeased her. “It’s a serious thing,” she said. “I’ll probably be the most left-wing person in all of Israel, but at least I’ll be arguing with people who deal with reality instead of living in a bubble.”
Marisa, granddaughter of Holocaust survivors. Her fierce words about memory felt like the key to something important they might have in common.
He typed:
I think about this a great deal: If we looked through the eyes of history, we’d live differently. We’d live right.
—A
He pressed Send. Then, unwilling to close his laptop, he pretended to engage his mind with other things that would please Helen, looking up definitions of archaic Portuguese words he already knew while his e-mail window remained open on his screen.
Three minutes, four, five.
His screen blinked. A reply from Marisa. He opened it. The e-mail was one line long.
If I looked through the eyes of history, I wouldn’t want to live.
Helen Watt was talking to him. He looked up but did not comprehend.
“For the third time,” she said. Her expression was keen with something that looked like anger. “I think Aleph was female.”
He stared at her.
“Evidently you don’t realize what a significant development this may be.”
He offered, more weakly than he wished, “I do.”
She shook her head skeptically. “She’d have to have an education beyond what a girl would usually receive,” Helen said. “She’d have been in a situation quite unusual for—”
“What’s the evidence?” he interrupted.
Pressing her lips together, she indicated the letter.
He donned the hateful gloves, pulled the letter toward him, and read it through. When he’d finished, he pushed it away carefully across the tabletop. “Fascinating, sure.” He knew he oughtn’t be so brusque, but for the moment he didn’t care. “They probably married her off the next week, though—sent some young man from Amsterdam to scribe for the rabbi just like they said they would. I doubt there’s much of a trail to follow.”
Helen Watt pursed her lips and seemed to keep a
thought to herself.
He sat back at his computer. His mind rang with defenses, vindications, excuses. He wanted to open his e-mail and type What I meant was.
Instead he opened the file he should have been working on all along. The busywork would right him. And then, when he’d settled himself down, he would know—he would work out—how to answer Marisa.
Cursing his gloves, he rifled the stack and pulled out the English version of HaCoen Mendes’s sermon. The spellings were worse than the usual seventeenth-century fare, the writer either poorly educated or new to English. “Use a dictionary, Aleph,” he muttered, though of course there had been few dictionaries in those days. He began the mindless labor of comparing this version with the translation he’d already prepared from the Portuguese version. The work was slow and, despite his effort to resist, his path through it was riddled with self-recrimination. Why had he e-mailed Marisa without first thinking it through? In his haste, had he offended her? Failed a test?
Well, Marisa, he thought, you have my full attention. Something no other woman had yet achieved. It was perhaps not so great an honor as he’d thought.
He forced himself to concentrate. Quickly he read through the remainder of the lecture. The Portuguese and English versions were identical—though Aaron’s English sounded like English, and Aleph’s grammar was upside down even by seventeenth-century standards. But rather that labor we steady and humble in our day—
Beside him, Helen was absorbed in her work.
“I’m going out to get lunch,” he said.
She nodded without looking up.
“Would you like anything from the shop across the way?” An olive branch. Some grad students fetched coffee, some dog-sat for the professors they worked with; Aaron as a rule did nothing of the sort.
She shook her head.
“Don’t you eat?”
Helen lifted her head from her work.
He’d meant it as a joke, the old tactic of establishing familiarity by assuming it, but the words had come out tinged with antagonism.
She was silent for a moment. Then she said, “I eat.”
She went back to her work.
Where was the button he could press to erase the past fifteen minutes? He had no business being nasty to the only professor likely to save him from Shakespeare. He wanted to apologize, but Helen didn’t look up. And he couldn’t bring himself to call for her attention when he didn’t know what words ought to follow.
He put on his coat and left the building. The air was colder than he’d expected. He walked quickly through the thin scrim of snow to stave off a faint, unfamiliar nausea of self-doubt. He bought himself a sandwich from the grocery next to Prospero’s and doubled back to the house to eat it.
Helen was nowhere to be seen.
They had only another hour before the Sotheby’s representative was due. He ought to translate at least one more document. He hung his coat on the rack in the entryway and set his food on the table in the library—he’d eat quickly and keep working. He sat, began to unwrap his sandwich, then stopped.
He told himself he could use it as a bargaining chip. He’d have information Helen might someday want, and if she didn’t kill him, she’d thank him. They still didn’t know, after all, the exact nature of the relationship between Rabbi HaCoen Mendes and the Benjamin HaLevy who’d owned this great house. Maybe knowing something about how HaLevy’s family had lived, how extravagant his house had been, would prove essential.
Of course, she’d told him not to.
Exactly.
He felt himself smile, and when he stood, though no one was there to see, he walked with a deliberately confident step.
The staircase was wide, the risers low, the climb an ascent of infinite shallow steps. His shoes thumped softly on thick wooden treads—the solidest construction he’d ever seen. No wonder the thing had lasted centuries. He passed the second floor, catching a quick glimpse of hallways leading to a series of side rooms—he’d explore there later if time allowed.
On the topmost floor the staircase ended in a wide landing, its cream-colored walls punctuated by large rectangular shadows—spots where portraits had once presumably hung in more extravagant days. A broad doorway led off the landing into a wide, dark-paneled balcony, its railing topped with elaborate carved flowers. Four partially open doors led off the balcony and several more were closed. Crossing to the nearest open door, Aaron swung it wide. It glided on silent hinges to reveal a small room. Furnished with desk, computer, and bookcases, it could have passed for a modern study if not for the narrow mullioned window and the carved wreath on the ceiling. Back to the balcony. The second door Aaron opened—a narrow jib door barely distinguishable from the wall’s paneling—revealed a twisting servants’ stair—a steep, dim descent that had once led, presumably, to the necessary rooms at the root of the house: kitchen, scullery, wine cellar. But the third door revealed a broad and more elegant chamber, brightly lit, with high windows and its own large hearth. The hearth was empty, the floor strewn with boxes. Evidently the Eastons hadn’t yet fully unpacked. Aaron could see that an open door beyond the sea of boxes led from the back of this room to a second large chamber, also filled with boxes, beyond which he could glimpse a doorway to a third. The suite of rooms, now impassable due to clutter, had obviously been designed in the style of the apartment of a nobleman or noblewoman: an anteroom, followed by what would have been a bedroom, followed by the closet, the most private of domestic spaces, a room for Shakespearean intrigue—Hamlet killing Polonius through the arras, Lady Macbeth sleepwalking. Whoever had built this house, Aaron thought, had either held high social station or aspired to it. If he guessed right, there would be another matching apartment opposite it—the lady would have had her own set of rooms, the lord his.
And sure enough, the fourth door off the landing revealed the largest space yet. This anteroom, clearly now in service as the Eastons’ sitting room, was topped with carvings that matched those in the first anteroom Aaron had seen, and was lit by three grand windows. In the center of the high-ceilinged room were a sofa, a few chairs, and a low table scattered with magazines and used dishes. Beyond it, a wide, open doorway led to a room containing a casually made bed and, everywhere, traces of Bridgette: a scarf dangling from the dresser top, two pairs of high-heeled shoes askew on the floor. Set in the far wall of this second room was a closed door—presumably the entrance to the inner sanctum—another elaborately carved closet, Aaron guessed, if it hadn’t already been converted into a modern master bathroom.
The door in the far wall opened. “Oh,” said Bridgette.
She wore a bathrobe. Her loose hair was bright against the green silk. For a moment she stood, disoriented, the centers of her blue eyes dark. A woman unguarded and afloat, unsure whose life she was waking to.
Then, swiftly, her expression tightened and turned wry. “Aren’t you supposed to be working downstairs?”
The house was silent. He had no idea whether Helen had returned from wherever she’d disappeared to. Before him, Bridgette stood, her composure restored, one hand set on her hip.
“Apologies,” Aaron said, keeping his expression neutral. He couldn’t help noticing the flow of the silk down Bridgette’s body. The places where it clung.
“Are you looking for something?” Suspicion warred with something kittenish in Bridgette’s voice.
He told her the truth. “I was checking the number of rooms.”
“Why?” she countered, a smile forming on her lips.
“We’re interested in what sort of household hid those documents. How wealthy, how large.” The we was a mistake, Aaron realized; she’d assume he’d snooped at Helen’s request and would surely mention it to Helen. “Actually,” he added with a small smile of his own, “I’m the one who wanted to know. I think getting the basic layout of the house may be helpful. I didn’t think anyone was home.” He lowered his voice. “I hope you’ll forgive me?”
She pursed her lips as though considering this.
“Sotheby’s is coming,” she said softly. “You’ll have to wrestle with your curiosity someplace else. Outside of my bedroom.”
He was grateful that he didn’t blush easily. “Of course.”
Her blue eyes were wide set, the elegant planes of her face lovely. He could make out her nipples under the robe.
“You do seem extremely curious,” she added, a lilt in her voice.
The power was his to claim or forfeit. He remembered himself, returned her stare, and waited until their eyes had been locked for several seconds. He said, “I am.”
He turned and left the room. And crossed the landing with the sensation of waking from the trance he’d been in since receiving Marisa’s second e-mail. This, he thought, was who he was. A man who knew when to leave a woman to absorb his words.
He was fairly certain that he had no particular interest in Bridgette beyond playing the game. But he sure as hell could play.
He descended the staircase at an unhurried pace. Whatever repercussion he might face for going upstairs, he’d keep his cool. It was a commitment. A religion. Aaron Levy, high priest of chill. He took the steps deliberately, savoring the steady working of his leg muscles, and he determined to answer Marisa’s e-mail with dry wit—after waiting at least one day.
Downstairs, Helen was at the table. As he entered she looked up distractedly, seeming not to notice that his footsteps had come from the wrong direction. The papers before her were in disarray, as though she’d abruptly discarded caution and shuffled them with her own hands. He glanced at his watch. The assessor from Sotheby’s would be here in forty-five minutes.
Helen’s face was taut. She addressed Aaron as though they’d been in the middle of a conversation, and it was a moment before he could follow her meaning. “The next eleven documents are all dated in the six months after the Yacob de Souza letter. And each one is in her handwriting and bears her initial.” With wavering fingers, Helen gestured at the pages fanned across the table. The motion was clumsy, and he resisted an urge to snatch the fragile papers away. “Letters,” she indicated. “Lists. Another sermon. Two orders for books. So Aleph didn’t stop scribing for the rabbi, if I’m understanding this correctly. They didn’t replace her, at least not in the half year after that letter from Amsterdam. But now look at this.” She waved him toward a page covered heavily in a broad and unfamiliar handwriting.
The Weight of Ink Page 11
