Love and Treasure (23 page)

Natalie said, “I guess that’s a good reason. My husband and I broke up because his girlfriend got pregnant.”

“Also a good reason.”

She laughed. “I am developing a theory of relationships. Would you like to hear it?”

“I would.”

“It’s called the Principle of One-Third. Each and every love affair lasts for precisely one-third longer than it should. If you’ve been together for three years, then the last year was a waste of time, more pain than pleasure.”

“And if you’ve been together for thirty years?”

“Shame about that last decade.”

He laughed. “Okay, then. What about a week?”

“You should have gotten out midmorning on the fourth day. I’m telling you, the theory works for every relationship. The only problem with the Principle of One-Third is that it’s only once the relationship is over that you know how much time you’ve wasted. You don’t know that the last decade was pointless until you’ve been with someone for the whole thirty years. And you definitely don’t know that your husband will start fucking an ERISA lawyer in year ten until you get to year twelve and realize that the last four were a farce.”

He considered her theory with due seriousness and found it, on the whole, to be sound. Certainly it had been during the last year of his three-year marriage that he had felt the most miserable, as sex had become a perfunctory necessity, devoid of desire and timed to Jessica’s ovulatory cycle. By then their conversations had devolved into an endless series of meta-arguments, arguments about who had started the argument, arguments about what they were really arguing about, about whose apology was less insincere. He applied Natalie’s one-third rule to some of the women he’d been with since his divorce, and it held up. And what about one-night stands? Should he have crept from the beds of those women after a few hours of lovemaking, instead of occasionally allowing the
rendezvous to last through breakfast? He briefly considered seeking clarification from the theory’s proponent, another one-night stand in the making.

Instead he said, “Tell me something about yourself that has nothing to do with your ex-husband.”

“I told you, I met Daniel in college. I have barely had an adult experience that doesn’t involve him. This is the first trip I’ve taken without him. I don’t own any clothes that he didn’t buy with me. I’m still using tampons from the wholesale-size pack he picked up for me at Costco last summer.”

“I would hope so,” he said. “Otherwise I would suggest you see a doctor.”

“Shut up.”

“Surely, though, even when you were together, you weren’t always in his company. Did you work in the same place?”

“No.”

“What do you do?”

“I’m a lawyer.”

“What kind?”

“I work in the litigation department at a big firm. Two blocks from the big firm where Daniel practices.”

Again, the ex-husband. Amitai gave up. “He is a lawyer, too?”

“Yes.”

“So you even went to law school together?”

“Sort of. We lived together, but we went to different schools. He went to Boston University. I went to Harvard.”

“You are smarter than he is.”

“I got better grades, that’s all.”

“This is something so curious to me about women. If it were Daniel who went to Harvard he would say, ‘Yes, I am smarter.’ But because you are a woman, you say only ‘I got better grades.’ ”

“You think that’s gender related?”

“Men are more confident than women.”

“Maybe some men are more confident than some women.”

“Maybe most men are more confident than most women.”

“Okay,” she said. “I think I can give you that.”

“Now, you must take my advice, and when people ask you about your ex-husband, you must say, ‘He was a nice man, but not smart enough for me.’ ”

She laughed. The sheet fell, revealing her breasts. She tugged it up but did not completely cover herself. “Now it’s your turn. Tell me something about yourself that has nothing to do with your ex-wife. Tell me what you did before you became an art dealer.”

“Before that? Nothing.”

“Where did you grow up?”

“In Israel.”

“Where?”

“On a kibbutz.”

“Really? That’s cool. I’ve always wanted to go to a kibbutz.”

She had always wanted to go to a kibbutz, Amitai thought, and he had always wanted to leave. His parents, immigrants from Syria, were the lone Levantine Jews on Kibbutz Hakotzer, the only Mizrahim amid hundreds of Ashkenazim. They had come as teenagers, assigned to the kibbutz by the agency responsible for dealing with the wave of unaccompanied minors who had arrived in Israel in the aftermath of the War of Independence. From the very first, the two young Syrian Jews had longed to disappear into the larger kibbutz community, to be engulfed rather than merely acculturated. As a small boy, Amitai had also wished to assimilate, to be just like all the other children, but by the time he was ten or eleven he had been able to recognize something his parents still did not. Vanishing wasn’t possible, not on a kibbutz founded by German immigrants who dismissed the Mizrahim of the city as ill educated, inclined to criminality, a less-cultured, less-intelligent Jew. As a teenager his blood had boiled at the insults, both great and small. The nickname given his darker-skinned brother—Kushi, its closest equivalent in English a word so offensive that liberal white Americans referred to it only by its first initial. The way his father’s name was never put up for discussion when it was time to appoint a new head of the furniture factory, no matter his seniority. That the Shashos were considered in most ways exceptions to the rule of Mizrahi inferiority was itself an insult. It was no accident that his parents had married each other three years after arriving at Kibbutz Hakotzer. Who else would have had them?

“You moved from the kibbutz to New York?” Natalie asked.

“First I was in the army.”

“What did you do in the army?”

“Nothing special. Infantry.” Back home, one of the first questions people asked of one another, especially men, was where they had served. A general sucking of teeth and raising of eyebrows would greet his
admission that he had been a member of Golani’s elite commando unit. Even the most diehard peaceniks were impressed. To his relief, Americans rarely knew enough to ask for details.

“Were you an officer?”

“Yes. But not very high. Just a lieutenant.”

“How come you didn’t stay in the army?”

“Nobody stays. You do your three years, one more if you have the bad judgment to sign up for an officer’s course, and then you leave to climb Annapurna or El Misti.”

Another sin of omission. It was true that most soldiers, even officers, mustered out as soon as their first period of duty was over, but in fact Amitai had planned to make a career in the army and would have done so if not for the events of September 27, 1993, when he had lost both the unimpeded use of his left arm and right leg and his faith in his country.

She reached over and traced the scars on his shoulder, the first so obvious a gesture she’d made, though he’d seen her notice his limp when they walked from Elek’s store to the coffeehouse, and again when he’d shifted her weight from his right thigh while they made love. In summer, Amitai tanned to a nearly Bedouin brown, and in winter, as now, he faded to a more sallow shade of olive. Black thatch covered his chest, forearms, and legs. But his graft had left a square of pale, smooth skin that she now covered with the palm of her hand. “Did you get these in the army?” she asked.

“Yes.”

She was sensitive enough to recognize the finality in his tone and did not try to pursue the topic. “So where did you go after the army?” she said. “Nepal or Peru?”

“I climbed the Great Hill.”

“Where’s that?”

“You know El Misti and not the Great Hill? The Great Hill is in your hometown. In Central Park.”

“That’s not a hill; it’s a picnic ground.” She smiled fondly. “The Great Hill. I haven’t been there since I was a kid.”

“It’s very beautiful, you should go back.”

“Maybe you should take me there.” His silence caused her to blush furiously. “I was just kidding,” she said. “I know this is a one-night thing. I’ll be sure to get out before the extra one-third kicks in.”

He saw that now might be the right time to change the subject. “Tell
me about the locket,” he said. “Why was it so important to your grandfather that you return it?”

She sat up in bed, pulled up the sheets, and tucked them firmly under her arms, covering herself. “I always assumed the necklace belonged to my grandmother,” she said. “I don’t know why. I’d never seen my grandmother wear it.”

In fact, she had never seen the pendant at all until the summer after her grandmother’s death, when she had been helping her mother clean out the piles of clothing, cosmetics, papers, and other bits and pieces that had accumulated during the decades of summers her grandparents had spent in their small cottage on the coast of Maine. Her grandfather had left them to the task, not because he couldn’t bear to do it, she thought, but because her mother had wanted the job for herself.

Her mother made four piles: a small heap of things to throw away, a larger one to donate, a third for Natalie’s grandfather, the last what she wanted to keep for herself.

Natalie remembered her mother finding the necklace in a velvet pouch in her grandfather’s top dresser drawer and adding it to the pile of things she intended to keep. When Grandpa Jack came in to check on their progress, he saw the pouch and snatched it up, as if it contained dirty pictures, compromising letters.

“What is this doing here?” he said.

Natalie’s mother said, “I’d like to have it, if you don’t mind. It’s so pretty. I never saw Mom wear it, but I’m sure she would have wanted me to have it.”

“It wasn’t hers to give,” he said.

Then he returned the pouch to the dresser drawer and chased them out of the room. Natalie’s mother had been furious, though Natalie didn’t understand why.

“My mother never wore jewelry at all,” Natalie said to Amitai. “Only her wedding band.”

“ ‘Wore’?”

“She died six years ago. My father wears her ring now, on top of his.”

“She must have had large hands, for your father to wear her ring.”

“She did. Much larger than mine. I have his hands. Stubby little fingers.”

He held his hand up to hers, his long fingers against her small ones. “I am sorry for your loss,” he said.

She smiled. “You’re so formal. But thank you.”

On the weekend of her wedding, which had taken place at her grandfather’s summer cottage in Red Hook, Maine, Natalie found herself wishing she had something of her mother’s or her grandmother’s to wear. “I needed something old, something borrowed, and something blue,” she said. “So I asked my grandfather if I could borrow that pendant.”

“It’s not blue,” her grandfather had said, only half joking, clearly reluctant to let her wear it, even for an hour. “And, anyway, peacocks are bad luck.”

“He was like Bilbo with the ring,” she told Amitai. “He didn’t want to give it up. It wasn’t like him to care so much about a thing like that. Eventually I wore him down, but I could tell he wasn’t happy about it.”

Despite her grandfather’s reluctance, she wore the pendant, though it was too long and dangled far past the neckline of the ill-fitting 1950s prom dress she had paid seventeen dollars for at the Goodwill in Ellsworth, Maine. She had not seen the necklace again until months later, when her grandfather had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and she had rushed up to Maine to facilitate his insistence on dying in his own bed on, as he said, his own terms.

“The day before he died he asked me to do something for him. I remember he took my hand in his. He had these big, freckled hands. Like my mom’s. He poured the pendant into my hand and closed my fingers around it. He told me the necklace hadn’t belonged to my grandmother. Or even to him. He told me he’d stolen it.”

As a young army officer at the end of World War II, Natalie’s grandfather told her, he had been assigned to guard the contents of a train full of plunder. It was his job to protect the property from looters of all kinds, and he’d failed. More than that, he had looted it himself.

“The Hungarian Gold Train,” Amitai said.

“Yes. He stole the pendant from the train. I asked him why, and he said it reminded him of a girl he knew. Someone he was in love with.”

“It was hers?” Amitai asked.

“No. But she was from Nagyvárad, too. I guess he took it thinking it might have belonged to her or to someone she knew. But it didn’t. He tried to give it to her, but she didn’t want it. And then he just kept it.”

“What happened to the girl?”

“They broke up, and he never saw her again. He told me that he couldn’t bear to die knowing that he’d kept the necklace. He asked me to find out who the necklace had belonged to and to return it for him.”

“And
I
am the one with a thing for lost causes?” Amitai said.

She shook her head. “I know. It’s an almost impossible task.”

“Not just impossible. Also pointless.”

She stiffened, and he reached out a soothing hand. “Forgive me. Sometimes in English I am too blunt.”

“Are you less blunt in Hebrew?” she said.

“No.” He smiled. “But in Hebrew it doesn’t matter. I only meant that even if the woman who owned the necklace did not die during the war, then she is by now anyway dead.”

“I know. But her heirs might not be. Especially if they lived in Budapest. There were many Budapest Jews who survived.”

“Yes, this is true.”

“It’s just … he never asked very much, my grandfather. He took care of everyone around him. My grandmother, my mother. Me. He was generous without ever letting you even notice he was giving you something. He was just a good man who felt like he’d done a terrible thing. And I promised him I’d at least try to fix it.”

“What he did was hardly terrible. If he hadn’t stolen the necklace from the train, it would have been lost like everything else.”

“Yes, but then he wouldn’t have felt like a thief.”

He said, “One theft does not make a man a thief.”

“You know that, and maybe I know that, too. But that’s not the way he saw things.”