The History of Love Read Online Free Page B

his mind that perhaps he should have called. She opened the door. She wore a blue scarf over her hair. He could hear the broadcast of a ball game through the neighbor’s wall.
    Once upon a time, the woman who had been a girl got on a boat to America and threw up the whole way, not because she was seasick but because she was pregnant. When she found out, she wrote to the boy. Every day she waited for a letter from him, but none came. She got bigger and bigger. She tried to hide it so she wouldn’t lose her job at the dress factory where she worked. A few weeks before the baby was born, she got news from someone who heard they were killing Jews in Poland. Where? she asked, but no one knew where. She stopped going to work. She couldn’t bring herself to get out of bed. After a week, the son of her boss came to see her. He brought her food to eat, and put a bouquet of flowers in a vase by her bed. When he found out she was pregnant, he called a midwife. A baby boy was born. One day the girl sat up in bed and saw the son of her boss rocking her child in the sunlight. A few months later, she agreed to marry him. Two years later, she had another child.
    The man who had become invisible stood in her living room listening to all of this. He was twenty-five years old. He had changed so much since he last saw her and now part of him wanted to laugh a hard, cold laugh. She gave him a small photograph of the boy, who was now five. Her hand was shaking. She said: You stopped writing. I thought you were dead. He looked at the photograph of the boy who would grow up to look like him, who, although the man didn’t know it then, would go to college, fall in love, fall out of love, become a famous writer. What’s his name? he asked . She said: I called him Isaac. They stood for a long time in silence as he stared at the picture. At last he managed three words: Come with me. The sound of children shouting came from the street below. She squeezed her eyes shut. Come with me, he said, holding out his hand . Tears rolled down her face. Three times he asked her. She shook her head. I can’t, she said. She looked down at the floor. Please , she said. And so he did the hardest thing he’d ever done in his life: he picked up his hat and walked away.
    And if the man who once upon a time had been a boy who promised he’d never fall in love with another girl as long as he lived kept his promise, it wasn’t because he was stubborn or even loyal. He couldn’t help it. And having hidden for three and a half years, hiding his love for a son who didn’t know he existed didn’t seem unthinkable. Not if it was what the only woman he would ever love needed him to do. After all, what does it mean for a man to hide one more thing when he has vanished completely?
    THE NIGHT BEFORE I was scheduled to model for the art class I was nervous and excited. I unbuttoned my shirt and took that off. Then I unbuckled my pants and took off those. My undershirt. The underpants. I stood in front of the hall mirror in my socks. I could hear the cries of children in the playground across the street. The string for the bulb was overhead, but I didn’t pull it. I stood looking at myself in what light was left. I’ve never thought of myself as handsome.
    As a child my mother and my aunts used to tell me that I would grow up to become handsome. It was clear to me that I wasn’t anything to look at then, but I believed that some measure of beauty might come to me eventually. I don’t know what I thought: that my ears, which stuck out at an undignified angle, would recede, that my head would somehow grow to fit them? That my hair, not unlike a toilet brush in texture, would, with time, unkink itself and reflect light? That my face, which held so little promise—eyelids as heavy as a frog’s, lips on the thin side—would somehow transform itself into something not regrettable? For years I would wake up in the morning and go to the mirror, hoping. Even when I was too old