She’d said it, and she’d looked at him just so, hadn’t she? And then she’d lofted her beer, and moved on to the subject of American Jews. And, foolishly, that was the part of the conversation Aaron had seized on. As if a little intellectual banter about history were his golden opportunity to prove his mettle to Marisa.
They don’t want memory, she’d said, or history that might make them uncomfortable. They just want to be liked. Being liked is their . . . sugar rush. She’d been talking about American Jews . . . but she could have been talking about Aaron.
The silence of the house reproached him. With a jolt, Aaron understood. Marisa had been talking about him.
Closing his eyes now, he saw her. The warm, bold light in her gaze. The invitation and the dare. Rodney Keller had seen perfectly what made Marisa unlike anyone Aaron had ever met: her unsettling directness.
It made him think of Ester Velasquez. Or rather—he schooled himself—the Ester Velasquez he’d chosen to believe in.
He had no idea, really, why Marisa had decided to sleep with him that day five months ago. But he had an inkling why she wanted nothing to do with him now.
He didn’t know what he was doing here in this house. He didn’t know what he was doing in England.
With an echoing bang, Bridgette emerged from a door on the other side of him. Seeing Aaron’s startled expression, she laughed. “This house is full of surprises, isn’t it?”
“Well,” he said. “You are, at any rate.”
This pleased her. She gave him his glass, and drank from hers, and pulled over two sleek metal folding chairs. “So,” she said. “What sort of discoveries have you made with those papers you’re so mad about? Have you learned who invented the wheel? Or was the first to discover fire?” She waved her manicured fingernails.
“Yes. In fact, it all happened right here in your house.”
She tapped her glass with a fingernail. “As I suspected.”
A moment’s silence. Slowly, then, Bridgette shook her head. Her face had tightened. “This goddamn house.”
“What about it?”
She sniffed. “Nothing.” She raised her glass, inspected it. “Tell me, has your lovely boss grown any cheerier? I thought she was going to burn a hole in Ian with her eyes.” She stiffened in her seat. “The papers are mine!”
He couldn’t help chuckling—he had to admit Bridgette did a good imitation, chin lifted and cheeks drawn, a wintry stare pinioning Aaron. “Not bad,” he said.
“Well, your boss reminds me a bit of my aunt—another scold totally convinced of her own view of things. Except my aunt fancied herself a bit of a mystic. Always said she had feelings about people. She used to read me fairy tales when they’d send me here to visit her, but the only one I remember is ‘The Little Match Girl.’ You know the one? The freezing girl in the snow? Peeping through windows at people basking at their fires, only she can’t feel the warmth of those fires one bit.” Something unidentifiable flitted across Bridgette’s face. “That’s just how I always felt listening to her. I used to try so hard to be wise and worthy of her standards, only half the time I didn’t know what the hell she was talking about. She knew it too. Do you know what the last thing was she said to me before she died? She was lying in the bloody hospital after they’d finally persuaded her to leave her precious house, but she squeezed my hand like I was the sick one. She said, It’s a shame, I’d hoped we could be good friends.”
They drank.
“Hey,” said Bridgette. “This is what you Americans do all day, is it? Sit about confessing things. What a rotten influence you are!” She leveled a long finger at his chest. “Yes,” she said. “You.”
Above him, the empty house towered. Windows with their black levers. Thick, age-distorted panes.
He answered Bridgette with a laugh, and drank again.
The moments of flirtation were ticking away. The angle of Bridgette’s head; the way she cast her body sideways in her narrow chair; the lengthening pauses between her wry questions about the solemn university life and his parries: every cue followed a script Aaron knew. This was the instant when he was supposed to make a move. And this. Now. He felt each opportunity pass, felt Bridgette register his immobility. In fact Bridgette was undeniably attractive. Nor was Aaron too scrupulous to say yes when a married woman made herself available; he’d slept with a married woman in college, in her own house no less, with children at school and husband at work. Still, the time was passing and Bridgette was waiting and it hadn’t escaped even Aaron’s notice that he was failing to play his part. The silence of the house pressed on him intolerably. He wanted to stand, to shout: Explain!
But the house had explained the best it could. He simply wanted more than it had to give him.
Bridgette made another show of checking on his drink. As she leaned over him, he raised a hand—an almost automatic motion—and parted the swinging curtain of her hair. It was only a small gesture—but it was all that was needed. Her face flashed with a hopefulness that made no sense to him—then, smiling softly, she ran the tips of her fingernails across the leg of his jeans. The touch was electric, and he felt his body answer without consulting him: a bolt of clarity amid his confusion.
It happened shockingly fast. She had his hand, she laid it on her breast, and the thin silk of her blouse seemed to dissolve so he could feel the hard nipple beneath, and he rose to his feet with a feeling like floating. And there they were, ascending a 350-year-old staircase, with windows looking in on them at every turn and treads that creaked taking their weight—and as they rose up into the dark, Bridgette tugging his hand, they could have been levitating, so swiftly and smoothly did they arrive at the topmost landing, at a half-closed door, and onto Bridgette’s cool sheets. Aaron had gone to bed with a woman on a whim before, but this blinded him with its suddenness. Bridgette smelled like lavender, like something at once spiced and anesthetizing, and it dizzied him, but that didn’t matter, she knew what she wanted him to do and it was easy for him to do it, to move with her, roll in a rush of sheets, of breath and pleasure. He caught her eyes once and laughed, delight rising suddenly in him—but Bridgette didn’t laugh, her face was fierce and focused—and he was swept away from this observation by an ingathering, down and down, the best of him concentrated in a single moment of such sweetness that distance disappeared, and he was flush with the world.
He came back to himself slowly. There was something sounding in his body . . . something steady, quiet as a voice whispering.
The ceiling above the bed was a clean eggshell white, an elaborate rosette in its exact center. Slowly his eyes slid down the far wall: the white trim; the paneled, white-painted walls.
At length he recognized it: the sound of his own heart.
He did not want to think of Marisa.
“Mmmm.” He could hear Bridgette smiling. She splayed a hand on his chest. Sliding up, she kissed his jaw.
He tightened his arms around her reflexively, but didn’t look at her.
“Don’t tell me that wasn’t good.” She was whispering directly into his ear.
“It was.”
There was a silence, enough time for him to hear how unpersuasive his own words sounded.
“Then,” she said, “what is it?”
He glanced at Bridgette—and saw on her face the last thing he expected: yearning. A heartbeat later he realized that his own face wore a similar expression—and that he and Bridgette Easton were looking at each other with a mutual desperation he didn’t understand.
He broke the gaze. When she spoke an instant later, she was once more the Bridgette he knew.
“Noooo!” she crooned. She pulled back as though to get a better look at him. “You feel guilty?”
He didn’t. What he felt, to his surprise, was old. And as stilled and powerless as the witnessing walls around him. Somehow, though, he’d stepped into some drama of Bridgette’s, some blunt-edged argument that she was carrying out with her husband or her life.
She’d
propped herself on one elbow. “You do! You . . . feel . . . guilty.” With each word, a jab of her finger in his chest. “But you’re not even married, are you? How can you feel guilty,” she said, “if I don’t?”
It wasn’t clear to him that Bridgette didn’t feel guilty—only that this was the conversation she was willing to have. He opened his mouth and spoke his part. “Ian seems like a nice guy.”
“He is.” A small furrow appeared between her perfectly shaped eyebrows. “He is,” she spoke slowly, “a very nice guy.” It was clear this wasn’t a compliment.
He was aware, suddenly, that they were both naked. He drew a sheet over himself.
“Listen,” she said, looking away. “You know as well as I do that these things don’t mean anything. We were both just curious.”
Reflexively, so as not to appear prudish, he tossed back, “And are you still curious?”
But the flirtation was hollow.
She let the question hang. She’d registered that he was no longer enchanted with her. Her blue-gray gaze was bright and hard, and it told him that she saw through him too; and she had no use for a forlorn American in her bed.
“No,” she said.
Dressing silently beside the bedstead, he looked out the window at the view it framed: the long slope down to the river. From this height, in the falling darkness, the water looked deceptively still. Zipping his jeans, he moved closer to the window, and he was seized by the feeling that she—Ester—had stood here at this very spot, in this very room, staring out just as he was at the last of the light on the slow-moving water, its current mesmerizing and out of reach.
Only when he was out on the street, Bridgette’s ironic farewell kisses lingering on each of his cheeks, did Marisa’s voice sound clearly in his mind.
Aaron, he heard her say.
That was all. In his head, he heard her calling his name. A simple, one-word reminder, like a conscience.
He wished then, wholeheartedly, that he hadn’t had sex with Bridgette Easton. It wasn’t that he thought there was anything so disturbing about a spontaneous hook-up—one whose implications were Bridgette’s to sort out, not his. It was simply that a spontaneous hook-up was no longer right for him, Aaron Levy. He’d changed enough in these past months to know that his old life was hollow.
Yet not enough to see a clear path toward anything he desired.
He passed Prospero’s, his collar turned up against the dark and chill. Prospero’s. He still didn’t fucking understand The Tempest.
I loved. The words followed him through the darkness, down the long hill all the way to the station, and—as he could not leave them behind—he acknowledged them his.
Part 4
22
June 28, 1665
15 Tamuz, 5425
London
The message boy, having delivered the pouch, tipped his hat and readied to flee.
“A moment’s help?” Rivka gestured toward a poorly sewn sack of coal resting just inside the door, where a different delivery boy had dropped it earlier that week, refusing to cross the threshold to deposit it in the storage bin.
From her writing table, Ester watched this one, a tall blond youth with paltry whiskers, shake his head swiftly. So it was in London now, every soul afraid of every other.
The coal was packed heavy and required two to lift—a feat that had proved too much for Ester, who this morning had dropped her end and nearly split the sack, prompting Rivka to dismiss her without a word. With a sigh, Rivka said to the boy, “For pay.”
The message boy—who himself looked in need of a good meal—hesitated. Then, peering at Rivka more closely, as though checking for signs of ill health, he stepped over the threshold with the shrug of one casting his lot. He hoisted the sack with Rivka and together they stepped it across the room and down a few creaking stairs to the storage bin. Then he followed Rivka back to the door, brushing his sooty palms. The coin she offered appeared to please him.
“’Tis a prayer and fasting day again, you know,” he said, cheerfully pocketing the coin, “on account of the plague.” He leaned back against the wall, supporting himself with his palms against the plaster, and bounced contentedly there, proud at being the bearer of important information. “The preachers agree ’tis God’s punishment, of course—the warning’s in the comet we see each night over London. The preachers say the plague is fire sent to purge us.” His eyes turned briefly, dutifully, to heaven. Then searched beyond Ester and Rivka for the kitchen door. “Though in a house of Jews perhaps there’s food on offer?”
“No food,” said Rivka.
“See my rotten fortune?” he cried. “Even in a Jew house I’m too lump-headed to find food. So my mother would say.” He shrugged, then—bouncing slow against their wall—spoke on. “But ’tis an unlucky day to be about in the street for such as you. You ought not be found, or they may say it’s you that brought the sickness. You seem good sorts, if you don’t mind I say so. Best to stay quiet and use your Jewish fortunes to buy anti-pestilence pills.” He turned and gazed out at the street a moment, then nodded with an air of great wisdom. “Me, I believe it’s the Papists, with their rotted ideas, as bring this judgment on our city.”
When he at last departed, Rivka turned heavily to Ester. “Neither of us must venture out until the fast day’s past.”
Only at her words did Ester feel how rare speech had become between them, as though the dying of foot traffic outside their window had commanded them lately to hush their own voices as well. In truth Ester needed no admonition to remain indoors; only yesterday she’d been nearing home when she’d encountered a group of flagellants, a dozen men marching solemnly down the center of the narrow street toward the river, silent but for a low periodic chant and the sickening sound of whips on their bare backs. Ester had pressed herself against a shopfront to let them pass. The sight had stayed with her: men stumbling within reach of her; men walking stolidly on with the blood running wet down their naked torsos, the muscles of their low backs sheeted in red.
Rivka shut the door behind the message boy. Leaning against it, she opened the purse and counted the coins. From her expression of relief, Ester guessed the money Manuel HaLevy had sent would suffice not only for the week’s necessities, but for laudanum. The illnesses that had for years pursued Rabbi HaCoen Mendes had taken renewed grip these past weeks, and now brought unremitting pain. Laudanum and willow bark were the only palliatives that relieved him.
The physician had come twice, on the second visit pressing the rabbi’s belly and declaring that this great disturbance of the humors must soon prove fatal. Ignoring Rivka’s soft moan at this pronouncement, the physician had knelt his substantial bulk with difficulty at the rabbi’s bedside and, looking without flinching into his patient’s face as though he could penetrate the rabbi’s blindness to show his respect, said, “A man understands the span of his life is limited, and a man deserves to know of his dwindling days so that he may speak of them with dignity to his God, whether he be Christian or Jew.” The rabbi, raising himself in his bed then, had clenched the physician’s thick hand with a grimace of gratitude. Leaving, the physician accepted his payment and told Rivka and Ester that he’d come no more, for he could see money was too scarce to spend on fruitless treatment . . . and as for himself, he’d hardly slept in days for doctoring the ill and the merely frightened, and he feared the new contagion himself if he allowed his humors to unbalance through overexertion. He’d sprinkled their doorstep with vinegar to ward off the plague, and left in haste.
Since then, the rabbi’s nights had grown fitful, punctured by pain from some unknown source that made him cry out in a thin, nearly unrecognizable voice. Waking at the sound of the cry, Ester would descend the stairs to find Rivka already at his side—for it seemed Rivka’s ears could hear the cry even as it formed in the rabbi’s throat: “Me esta tuyendo, Mãe.” Sometimes thrice in a night they stood together beside his bed or outside his door, Ester and Rivka, waiting in silence to hear his b
reathing settle. Only once, her gaze touching Ester’s shyly in the low light of the banked fire, did Rivka speak. “Who does he ask for?” Her voice was hoarse.
The fire flickered, for an instant revealing the longing on Rivka’s worn, pocked face.
Ester answered as truly as she could. She said, “He calls for comfort. I believe he calls for his mother.”
Rivka’s eyes shone with brief disappointment, then relief—then she wiped them with a quick, dismissive hand. And Ester rued her own blindness: so firmly had she believed she alone longed for what was out of reach, she’d admired Rivka’s wordless devotion to the rabbi without ever considering what Rivka’s heart might wish.
With each day of the rabbi’s labored breath, the solitude of their household seemed to deepen. A woman had knocked at the door on Sabbath and, in low tones, urged flight to the countryside—but before Ester could rise to see which of the congregation’s matrons it was, she’d heard Rivka tell the woman that the rabbi was ill, though not of plague, and couldn’t withstand the journey. By the time Ester had reached the door the woman had hurried away, as though Rivka’s answer were a pestilence in itself. Indeed Ester could no longer be certain which of the congregation were still in London and which had fled. The press of whispering women trading information outside the synagogue—who was leaving, who remaining in the city?—had vanished when the synagogue itself was shuttered. London seemed redrawn: the invisible borders between parishes, once unnoticed, now were gulfs to be crossed at one’s peril—for the death-roll of each was attended to widely, and no matter how the dead’s kin might lie to mask the cause of death, the numbers spoke plainly. The rising toll had spread these weeks from parish to parish like a tide—or rather, like a fire, for its advance was uneven, as though a quixotic wind carried sparks that might set one patch of forest ablaze while leaving another, for now, untouched. Fear now infected every human transaction.
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