That night, over tea in the chill of his flat, the heater ticking quietly by the legs of his desk chair, he wrote an e-mail to Marisa.
Hey there Marisa.
The cursor blinked at him, impassive, a virtual sphinx.
“Hey there.” The acceptable territory between the risky “Dear” and the too-chilly “Hi.”
How goes life on the kibbutz? Have you repented of your foolishness yet, and booked a ticket back to London to enjoy rain and greasy chips? & how goes the Hebrew? You know I can’t help with modern usage, but if you ever run across a falafel vendor speaking ancient Aramaic or biblical Hebrew, I’m your man.
“I’m your man.” He stared at the words, wondering how she might hear them.
Marisa. Too often he’d relived it when he should have been dissecting Shakespeare: The slow tease of her black tank-top lifting over her head. The shock of her eyes as she turned. Her hands, her every motion, as direct as a drumbeat.
Therefore my mistress’ eyes are raven black. If Shakespeare had a Dark Lady to yearn for and despair over until her image wore a path in his thoughts, couldn’t he? Or was something about Aaron too petty to qualify for such poetic heights of passion—was he, despite every accomplishment and award, too mundane?
Sometimes the twin thoughts pinioned him, tackling him as the water thrummed against his chest in the shower or as he loaded his dinner tray in the college’s hall: that he’d only fancied himself good enough to be her lover. Just as he’d fancied himself a true scholar of Shakespeare’s world.
He typed with a fresh burst of energy.
Here, an unexpected turn of events. Are you sitting? Sit. Shakespeare will have to wait, I’m afraid. There’s been a trove of old documents found, from the seventeenth century. It’s been hiding under a stairwell in a dormitory suburb of London through who knows how many owners, and only now did someone think to open up the space for renovations. And presto: History Unearthed.
The trouble is that the prof who’s looking into this is an utter bitch, a Brit of the ice-in-her-veins variety. She’s invited me to be her assistant and I can’t resist the temptation, though it’s going to be hell working with her, so will you kindly remind me to keep my sense of humor?
The first interesting thing about these papers—and the thing that gives us a good guess at which group of English Jews left them—is that they aren’t only in Hebrew and English and Latin, but also in Castilian and Portuguese. That probably doesn’t make a bit of sense to someone who isn’t wasting her youth researching seventeenth-century Jewish history . . .
Dared he risk boring her? He could lose the tenuous intimacy that stretched between them. One wrong move, he felt, would snap it. And sharing the strange excitement he felt over these two shelves of documents would be like standing before her naked.
But wasn’t that the point?
Hesitantly he worked the keyboard, and as he did it seized him: if he could only bring her into his excitement, pick her up with his two typing hands and carry her into the world as he saw it, she would know him.
And no one had ever known him.
He laid this thought before him, examined it for self-pity, found stores of it, and declared it true nonetheless. Who, in fact, understood him? None of his many ex-girlfriends. Not his chatty mother, his doe-eyed sister, nor even his rabbi father, with his rigidly benign religion. If Aaron could persuade Marisa to feel what he’d felt today in front of that staircase in Richmond, it would be like having her in his arms—unspooling his life and respooling it in her presence. Marisa beside him, as he cringed in the pew through sermons that earned his father effusive praise; beside him at the newly sponged kitchen table Sunday mornings, as he moved from the newspaper to hardcover tomes taken from his father’s immaculate library—cracking the spines of history books his father had never opened, to learn of the deaths of entire worlds, the sowing or defeat of ideas, millions of lives rising and falling in the surf of time . . . all filling Aaron with awe and fear, and a kind of excitement he knew not to admit to the high school classmates who admired his cool mastery of all he encountered.
Today, when he’d peered under that staircase, it was as though what he’d starved for all these lifeless months of dissertation research had been restored to him. History, reaching out and caressing his face once more, the way it had years ago as he sat reading at his parents’ kitchen table. The gentle, insistent touch of something like a conscience, stilling him. Waking him to a lucid new purpose.
And to something else he preferred not to dwell on. At the sight of those shelves beneath the stair, his bones had balked at supporting his weight. He’d felt them waver, almost fail as he caught his balance—as though they understood already, decades ahead of Aaron, about death.
Even the recollection made him shudder.
He took his hands off the computer keyboard, stretched his arms high over his head until he felt a satisfying crack somewhere in the middle of his back, then sipped the bitter tea he’d made on the hot plate.
He didn’t care if Marisa was right for him. What did it even mean, for one human to be right for another? The correct match of life goals to ensure a few decades of life-cycle events and platitudes? He didn’t care what Marisa’s toughness portended, or whether her free spirit would scoff at domestication—he didn’t care, in short, whether a man could make a life with such a woman. He wanted to be good enough for her. He craved the compact grace of her body, the sharp line of her cropped hair, the soft skin of her upper arms sliding down his shoulders. The onslaught of her laughter.
Desire moved his hands across the desert of his keyboard. To weave a web for her. To lure her with intelligence, humor. To pique her curiosity until she couldn’t refuse it.
Are you ready for the lecture, Marisa? I promise I’ll be as brief as I can, and you’ll be committing the magnanimous act of humoring an irrationally exuberant postgraduate who needs to think through a new discovery. Think of this as your charitable donation to seventeenth-century scholarship.
So here are a few things most people don’t know. Ready? The Jews were booted out of England in 1290 (see under: tribulations, massacres, betrayals, the usual). And were officially gone for nearly four hundred years—although yes, of course, a few came and went disguised as Christians.