Will recognized the logic. It was true. He had been bluffing his way through in that typically English way. They taught it in the best public schools: bullshit studies. Learn to get by on native wit and charm. Never be anything so boring as a qualified expert; be the gifted amateur. That's what he had done by marching into Crown Heights in his bloody chinos with his bloody notebook. As if it would all fall into his charming English lap. They needed help.
'Who?'
'What about Joel?'
'Joel Kaufman?' He had been in the journalism programme with Will at Columbia; he was now writing for the sports pages of Newsday. 'He's Jewish but only technically. He barely knows more than I do.'
'Ethan Greenberg?'
'He's in Hong Kong. For the Journal.'
'This is pathetic. We're in New York. We must know some Jews!'
'I actually know plenty of Jews Will said, thinking suddenly of Schwarz and Woodstein in the pod at work, which in turn reminded him that he had made no contact with the office all day. He had ignored Harden's email. He would have to do something; he couldn't just go AWOL. But it was too much to think about; he shoved the thought aside, telling himself he would deal with it as soon as he left Tom's apartment.
'The trouble is, I can't start blabbing about this situation to just anyone. The risk is too great. It has to be someone who is not just Jewish but who's smart enough to know Jewish things, who might know about this world,' he gestured towards the screen, still flickering with the map of Eastern Parkway, 'and who we can trust. I can't think of anyone who falls into that category.'
I can,' said Tom, though his face registered no pleasure at the fact.
'Who?'
'to: 'You can't be serious. TO? To help Beth?'
'Who else can do it, Will? Who else?'
Will fell back onto the couch, clenching his jaw, the muscle inside his cheek tightening on and off as if pulsing with an alternating current. Once again, Tom was right. TO checked all the boxes. She was Jewish, smart and would never betray a secret. But how could he make that phone call? They had not spoken in more than four years.
For nearly nine months, from the start of Columbia to that Memorial Day weekend, they had been inseparable. She was a fine art student and Will had fallen for her before either of them had said a word. He could not lie: it was lust. She was the woman on campus everyone noticed, from the diamond stud in her nose to the ring that pierced her belly button; from the flat, constantly exposed midriff to the tint of blue running through her hair. Most women over the age of sixteen could not carry off that look, but TO had enough natural beauty to get away with it.
They had started dating straight away, becoming virtual recluses in his tiny apartment on 113th and Amsterdam. They would have sex in the daytime, eat Chinese food, see movies and have more sex until it was morning again.
Appearances were misleading. People saw the blue hair and the navel ring and assumed TO was a wild, free spirit one of those girls in movies who leap onto the roof to dance in the moonlight or take spontaneous rides to the shore to see the fishing boats. Despite the piercings and torn jeans, TO was not like that. Underneath that neo- hippy exterior, Will soon discovered a precise, analytical brain that could be terrifying in its demand for exactitude. Conversation with TO was a mental work-out: she let Will get away with nothing.
She seemed to have read everything — citing plot lines from Turgenev one moment, the central doctrinal tenets of Lutheranism the next — and have absorbed it all. The only crack in her armour, again defying all expectations, was popular culture. She could get by on the most recent stuff, but dip into the childhood memories she and Will were meant to share and she would become clueless. Mention Grease and she assumed you meant Greece; refer to 'Valley Girls' and she would ask, 'Which valley?' Will found it endearing; besides, it was reassuring to know there was one area where the human database he was dating had a defect. He concluded the two facts were related: when kids like him were watching mindless TV and listening to trashy pop, TO had been reading, reading, reading.
Mind you, all that was a guess. TO only spoke about her childhood in the vaguest terms. (Even her name remained a mystery: a nickname she had got as a toddler, she said, its origins forgotten.) He had never met her parents or siblings: that would be impossible. Despite her own aggressively irreligious life — she made a point of ordering jumbo shrimp and sweet and sour pork — she explained that her family were still fairly traditional and they would just not accept a Gentile boyfriend. 'But we're not getting married!' he would say. 'It doesn't matter,' would be the reply. 'Even the theoretical possibility that one day we might, that we are together at all, is bad enough. For them.'
They went through all the arguments. He would accuse her unseen parents — and he never even glimpsed a photograph of them — of racism, as bad as the prejudice of any anti-Semite who would bar his daughter going out with a Jew. She would then walk him through the long, bloody course of Jewish history. Knowledgeable as ever, she would tell how, across continents and down the centuries, Jews had been tormented, clinging only perilously to their lives and the civilization they had created. Jewish culture could not survive, people like her parents believed, if it gradually dissolved, through intermarriage and assimilation, into the general population — like a drop of blue hair-dye in an ocean of clear water. 'So that's what your parents believe,' Will would say. 'What about you?
What do you believe?'
Her answers were never clear enough, not for Will. The arguments became too tiring. And, while the forbiddenness of their romance had been a thrill at first, making them coconspirators in the Manhattan winter, by the spring it had begun to pall. He did not like feeling that their fate was being decided by a vast, external force — five thousand years of history — of which he knew so little and over which he had no influence. By the time he met Beth, he knew he and TO had run out of road.
It ended very badly. He had been a coward and started seeing Beth before breaking off properly from TO: she had found a digital picture of the new girlfriend on his computer.
That was bad enough, but she was furious that what they had come to call 'the Jewish thing' had proved so decisive.
She was angry with him for allowing that to be an obstacle — for rejecting her because of 'a fact about myself I cannot change' — but he always had the feeling the fury was not only directed at him. He could see she was raging at a heritage, a culture,' that she had mostly abandoned but which had pulled her apart from a man she had loved. Their last conversation was a shouting match. His last image of her was a face raw with tears. Occasionally, he wondered who had won out: the uptight parents or the blue-streaked world of art and adventure that had so enthralled the girl he had fallen in love with.
Now Tom was suggesting he get in touch. Tonight, at nearly midnight. He had her cell phone number; but what would he say? How would he explain that the only reason he was making contact was because he needed something — and that was for the sake of the woman who had stolen him from her? How would he make that call? And why would she do anything but slam the phone down, vowing never to speak to him again?
And yet, he was desperate and Tom was right. She was the closest thing to the expert they needed. He would have to do it. He would have to put aside his own emotions, including his cowardice, and dial that number. Now.
He paced up and down the room for a while, mentally scripting his opening. It was like writing for the paper: once he had his first line, he had the courage to plunge in, hoping instinct would take care of the rest. To increase his chances for success, or at least to prevent immediate failure, he also played a cheap trick.
He reckoned that if TO's number was still stored on his phone, there was at least a possibility that his lived on in her SIM card, too. He imagined the sight of his name flashing up on her screen. So he called from Tom's line, knowing his number would be wholly unfamiliar. It was an ambush call.
'Hello, TO? It's Will.' Loud noise in the background. A club?
A party? 'Hi.'
'Will Monroe.'
'I don't know any other Wills, Will. Not before, not since.
What's up?'
He had to hand it to her: as an instant response, with barely a second's thinking time, that was not bad. And entirely typical: the hint of a put-down, the reference to their past, the rapid-fire formulation. The only bum note
