The Jinni never went back again, after that.
Months turned into years. Each winter brought distress, each spring its relief. Summers were a private glory. They spent the long, warm nights walking together along the Harlem River Speedway, then across the river into Highbridge’s quiet hills. They returned often to Central Park, retracing the familiar paths. When the first inevitable signs of autumn arrived, she’d resign herself to summer’s loss, and brace once more for winter.
The colder months were difficult for him as well. He endured the rainy nights in his apartment or the shop, growing ever more restless and morose, and at the end of a wet autumn had to be cajoled into better humor. He felt less constrained in winter—but now he must be a help and a support, and go out even on the nights he’d rather stay inside so that the Golem could walk away her discomfort, and quiet her mind.
She, meanwhile, spent the winters wheedling and snappish. On the worst nights, she had a tendency to forget her words in the middle of a sentence and stare at thin air. When he tried to coax her into the bed he’d built—wrought iron, well soldered, with globe-topped finials—she either spurned him with a frown of annoyance, or agreed with startling urgency. She had no bodily warmth of her own, and at times, holding her in winter, he had to keep from flinching away from her chilled touch. He was always grateful for the forge the next morning.
“How is Chava?” Arbeely would ask on the days that the Jinni seemed particularly distracted, rolling and smoking his cigarettes with rare ferocity.
“Fretting, as usual, about everything she can’t control,” his partner would say; or else simply, “I am counting the nights until spring.”
But in the summer the Jinni often strolled through the shop door in a fine mood, smiling or whistling to himself. Then Arbeely would merely sigh, irritated and not a little jealous.
“You need to find yourself someone,” the Jinni might say on these ebullient mornings.
And his partner would scowl and reply, “I’m far too busy, and some of us need to sleep.”
The Golem, however, did not have the advantage of working among those who knew her secret. It was most difficult on winter mornings, before the ovens’ heat could warm her; she might move clumsily, or fail to hear a customer’s order, or fall into a mesmerized trance while kneading the dough. And then, in the summers, she had to hide her happiness: an easier subterfuge, but one that carried a greater portion of shame.
“Thea wants me to come to supper,” she told the Jinni sourly one winter night, as they walked the Mall beneath the snowy elms. “She’s planning, in secret, to invite a neighbor of hers, a man she thinks of as ‘poor lonely Eugene.’ You can guess her motives.”
“I see,” he said gravely. “A rival. Shall I challenge him to combat?”
“Ahmad.”
“If you like him, I suppose you can see him on alternate Thursdays.”
She responded to this with an Italian phrase they’d heard near Mulberry Street; it translated to “misery pig,” an image so evocative that they’d added it at once to the lexicon of borrowed human idioms that now peppered their conversations. The Jinni’s particular favorite was don’t bite my head off, overheard on a summer night when they’d walked beneath a couple arguing on a fire escape. The phrase itself, and the plaintive anger with which the man had yelled it—Sweet Jaysus, Bernice, don’t bite my head off!—had struck the Jinni as indescribably hilarious, and he’d laughed so hard that the Golem had been forced to grab his elbow and half drag him down the street before the furious man could come after them. Her own favorite idioms tended to be terms of frustration, and she was given many opportunities to practice them.
“I know you think it’s amusing,” she told him, “but it’ll be such a terrible strain.” A thought occurred to her; she turned to him, suddenly worried. “You do know that I’d tell them about you if I could, don’t you? Only it would cause so much gossip and whispering, they’d think about nothing else, and I’d never hear the end of it—”
He took her hand and squeezed it. “I know, Chava. Don’t worry. I’m content to be your clandestine lover.”
She smiled at that, slightly mollified, but the worry remained. Was he content? She never quite knew for certain. Were all lovers so opaque to their partners? Or did he only seem so in comparison, given that his thoughts alone were hidden to her sight? She had no true wish to know his every desire or fear; she’d long since learned that some amount of privacy was necessary in a relationship. And yet there were nights, on the rooftops and on the Park’s familiar paths, when a dark and faraway look would steal across his face, and the quiet would stretch too long between them; and in those moments she’d give everything she owned just to know what he was thinking.
He made her feel so young and inexperienced sometimes, so very unsure of herself. He’d lived for centuries, but she knew next to nothing of his earlier life, only a scant handful of facts. Likely he could tell her tales to fill a year’s worth of nights—so why didn’t he? Did it pain him too much? Or did he think that the stories would pain her? She knew that he’d had lovers, knew that he’d lived in a manner that humans would call immoral; that much, at least, he’d made clear. Did he
