The Storyteller

Later, she lay on her bed and looked out the window, down into the backyard garden. The rose was still in bloom.

She had just walked out. She had made the comment about the hat and walked out. She hadn’t even said good-bye to Micha; she had behaved like some stupid girl in a chick flick.

But she had been so angry that he thought she was like the others. Of course, she was like the others—a little. Surely everybody was, at eighteen. But how could she avoid telling Gitta …

She grabbed the phone off the antique nightstand she had once, on a too-gray day, painted green. She dialed Gitta’s number—to get it over with.

“Gitta?” she said. “Remember we were talking about Abel?”

“Who?”

“Ta

Gitta, stuck in the middle of a formula she was trying to understand or at least learn by heart for a physics test, was slow to react. “Yeah … I remember,” she said finally. “Your fuck buddy.”

A

“Excuse me, what? How do you know?”

“Never mind,” said A

“That’s good,” Gitta said. “Little lamb, you know I’d love to talk longer, but physics is calling …”

“Sure.” A

What an old song. Where did someone like Abel’s mother get a cassette of Leonard Cohen? Michelle—he’d called her Michelle. How had Michelle, who didn’t speak a word of English, who at most learned Russian at school—like they did back then—how had she come by that particular cassette? And where, A

A

She knew that her mother was home only because she heard the key being turned in the lock, very gently. Linda was a gentle person, a quiet person; you could easily overlook her, and she was often overlooked. She was an assistant professor at the university, where she taught literature. She was neither very popular with her students nor very unpopular; they hardly noticed her. They went to her lectures and later only remembered her words, not who had spoken them. Maybe that was the best and purest kind of a lecture. Or the worst.

Linda walked up behind A

“You’re thinking about something,” Linda said.

A

For a while, they just stood there looking out into the small world of the garden, where a robin was hopping around under the rosebush and pecking at the seeds A

“Lately I seem to be thinking about everything at the same time,” A

“Too … pretty,” Linda repeated, confused.

“Do you realize that the light inside this house is always blue?” A

Linda shook her head. “No, never. Why? I know which school you’re talking about, though. I’ve seen it many times; I’ve driven past it on Wolgaster Street …”

“Exactly.” A

“When you got to know Papa,” she said, “what was the first thing you thought? The very first thing?”

Linda thought about it for a moment. “It was at a dance for the medical students,” she said. “At the end of college. You know the story. Someone had dragged me along; I had even bought a new dress. The dance was horrible. It was noisy; it was full of cigarette smoke—those were the days when you were allowed to smoke just about everywhere … you couldn’t see anything, really, because of all the smoke. The first thing I thought about your father was that he noticed me. Even with all those people and all that smoke, even though nobody ever notices me … he came toward me, a big, slightly too-broad-shouldered man whom I had never seen before … and he said he didn’t know how to dance and asked if I would like to ‘not dance’ with him.” Her gaze slipped into the past, her gray eyes sliding behind a golden veil, and A

All weekend long, A