He laughed. Now I wanted to kill him—then die.
“That’s a terrible reason,” he said.
“Yeah? You’ve got a better one?”
He leaned forward. He cupped his hands around my face, one warm hand over each cheek. He kissed me.
“Because I wanted to,” he said when he let go. “That would have sufficed.”
20
We kissed only once more that night, on the steps of the church before he went in one direction and I went in the other. And yes, I lay awake half the night replaying the details in my mind, imagining I could still feel his hands on my face, my neck, the curve of my hip, his fingers entwined in mine, his lips, and the way that, for a few seconds, it felt like we were breathing together. I replayed the goodbye, the awkward moment beneath the streetlight, our breath white puffs disappearing into the night, him not asking me back to his dorm room, me babbling something inane about being able to use my father’s car when I asked nicely but sometimes preferring my bike and sometimes not, and then one final, feathery peck on the cheek, the soft touch of my gloved fingers against his. I woke up convinced that if it hadn’t been a dream, it had been an aberration, and not only had I guilted him into a pity kiss—Max, of all people, a college guy, and, more to the point, a college guy who’d never shown any romantic inclinations in my direction—but there was no way I’d be able to return to the Hoff’s office. It would be torture, pretending to translate while I wondered whether Max was staring at me, and what kind of pitying, mocking thoughts were running through his head as he did. Or worse, realize that he wasn’t staring, because he couldn’t care less.
Suffice it to say, I wasn’t expecting a happy ending, any more than I was expecting my phone to buzz with an incoming text. From him:
Thinking about you.
21
Max had a half-moon of freckles on his left shoulder.
Max was nearly as bad at getting jokes as he was at making them, but he was ticklish, especially on the bottom of his right foot, and when he laughed, his face turned pink.
Max liked to lie on his stomach and let me trace messages across his bare back as he guessed what I was trying to say. X marks the spot, I wrote. Max and Nora, sitting in a tree, I wrote. I love you, I wrote. He always guessed wrong, and when he did, he twisted beneath me, propped himself up on his elbows, and kissed me, once for each secret message. “Now you guess what that means,” he always said.
Max and I barricaded ourselves in his room whenever we knew Adriane and Chris would be out. We locked the door, curled up together on his sagging mattress, and watched movies and ate Oreos and listened to moody indie rock, and a few times, when I told my parents I’d be sleeping over at Adriane’s, we stayed there, together, in the dark, until morning.
Max never came to my house. He never met my parents. And he never talked about his, except to say they lived in San Diego, and it was the longest they’d lived anywhere, as if they’d waited until he was out of the house to finally make a home.
Max never knew about my brother.
Max hated Adriane, and the feeling was mutual. She teased him about his glasses and his shaggy hair and the way he gravitated to my side and took my hand as soon as he entered a room, and he blanched every time she described some aspect of her sex life, which she only did to make him squirm. He thought she was dumb and desperate; she thought he was boring. Both were careful never to make me choose.
Max blushed. When he was thinking about kissing me, when I crept up behind him and pressed my lips to the base of his neck, and always when he lied, which he did infrequently and poorly and almost exclusively to spare someone’s feelings and never to me. He blushed when, three months after our first kiss, he took off his glasses, blinked owlishly for a few seconds, then told me he loved me. “You tell me that here?” I said, shoving him, because we were standing in front of the Walmart, which I would now be obligated to think of as a sacred space, and then I laughed and I kissed him and I said, not for the first time but for the first time like this, “I love you, too.”
22
Despite how it felt, we weren’t together all day, every day. Life went on. Snow fell, my parents continued to ignore me and each other, Adriane plotted our Parisian adventures while I kept pretending that some fairy godmother would appear to supply the plane ticket I’d never be able to afford but now had to, because going to Paris meant going to Paris with Max. Chris and Max spent more and more time locked up in the Hoff’s lair, poring over the Book, laboring to match symbol to word and word to meaning. Using the fragment of the alchemical formula—for that’s what the hidden pages had turned out to be—they’d managed to piece together a rough language of glyphs. Applying it to the Book was painstaking, as page after page defied meaningful translation, and then, always, just when they were about to give up, the symbols would yield a line that almost made sense: Deus in natura se obscurat et celata eius corripimus. God hides in nature, and we plunder his secrets. Max, not good with frustration, snapped whenever the subject came up, so I stopped asking him about his research and stopped boring him with mine. I’d gone back through the letters that led up to the Petrarch revelation—I just wasn’t the kind of person who could skip to the end of a book to find out what happened—and backtracking turned out to be the right call. Because, as even Adriane would have admitted, things were finally getting good.
E. J. Weston, to her full brother John Fr. Weston, greetings.
How you would laugh to see me! Stars sparkle in my eyes, melodies trill in my ears, a soft breeze lifts my steps. Love, which for so long I have thought nothing but a poet’s folly, has seized me, and I am transformed. I can no longer deny the truth in Petrarch’s words:
I bless the place, the time and hour of the day
that my eyes aimed their sights at such a height.
You will ask what use is a love with no respectable end. You will call Thomas a mere apprentice, but nothing about him could be mere. His touch with the potions is nimble and sure. Despite his lack of schooling, Latin flows from his pen, for so determined was he to penetrate the secrets of the ancients that he schooled himself in their language. To call him ignorant would be ignorance itself. Your Schoolmen have made you forget, dearest brother, that there are many ways of knowing.
Perhaps love has made me frivolous, but there is so much darkness here. Surely you can allow me a few moments of light? This happiness will not last, as nothing does. Our Father taught us that. The heavens may be immutable, but here in our earthly sphere, life is constant flux and decay. We can either watch the world change around us, like our Father before us, or we can change it to suit our desires.
And thus I have a decision to make. Pray that I choose wisely.
16 January 1599 Prague.
So Elizabeth was in love.
I wasn’t the type to write sappy love letters or moon over cheesy love songs whose inane lyrics suddenly seemed deep and true and meant only for me—but I was happy enough for her to do it for me. Stars sparkle in my eyes, I thought, trying to imagine what Max would do if I laid it out for him like that, complete with trilling melodies and air-cushioned steps, light banishing the darkness.
Probably just blush and change the subject.
The next several letters spoke of Elizabeth’s attempts to get her property back from the Emperor, her poetry, her mysterious ally and the dangers he posed, the decision she faced, and the way the frozen Vltava glistened in the sun, but more than anything, they spoke of Thomas.
The laboratory smells like him, a rich mixture of sulfur and ash. A badge of his low station, he says. But I have glimpsed the pride that lies beneath his modesty. He has confided his dreams of discovering the philosopher’s stone, not for his own glory, but for the glory of God.
And though we were both afraid, he took my hand.
One hand in another, nothing more, and yet it was more than anything I have known.
Shadows flickered in the candlelight. Brother, you never knew how the alchemical cha
mbers terrified me as a child. I would scurry behind our Father’s black cloak as it swept through the room, while his men glared at me over their cauldrons, their faces obscured by mushrooms of black smoke. I feared the evils our Father might awaken through his dark conjuring. But Thomas has released me from my fear by revealing the essential truth. Alchemy is not a courting of darkness. It is a quest for light.
I tried to come to the office when I knew Max would be there and Chris wouldn’t—and that was strange in itself, wanting to see less of Chris for once, wanting to keep Max to myself (an impulse that only made me more certain I’d been right all these years about Chris and Adriane wishing me away so they could be alone). But stranger still was the way it felt to sit at the table beside Max, staring blankly at my notebook, lost in the steady rhythm of his breathing, the smell of his shampoo, the weight of his hand on my leg, the press of his foot against mine, the inches between our shoulders, or the stray hair that he always brushed off his forehead before he leaned in to kiss me. It wasn’t conducive to getting much done. I could have written a dissertation on his elbow, or the way his collarbone jutted out from his faded T-shirts, but the actual work went slowly, and never more so than when he bent toward me, touched his cheek to mine, and watched Elizabeth’s words flow from my pen.
“You have to stop that,” I finally told him.
“What?” He kissed my cheek. “This?” He traced a finger along my jawline, then pressed it to my lips. “Or this?”
I smiled. There were other benefits to coming to the office when Max and I could be alone.
“Watching me work,” I said. “It’s distracting.”
“I don’t have to watch. I told you I could help—”
“And I told you I’m better at Latin than you are, so I’m not the one who needs help. At least, not with Latin.” I leaned in to kiss him, but he pulled away.
“Fine,” he said stiffly. “Forget I asked.”
“Max—”
“No, you’re right. This is a distraction.” He scraped his chair down to the other side of the table. “Better?”
“You’re being ridiculous.”
“I’m just doing what you want.”
I swallowed a sigh. “You’re right,” I said. “I’m being ridiculous.” I dragged my chair next to his. “Distract me.”
“Just forget it.”
I took his pen out of his hand and wove his fingers through mine. “I can be distracting, too,” I said, and finally found, in the corner of his lips and the crinkle of his eyes, the hint of a smile. I brushed the hair out of his eyes and I kissed him, and we distracted each other for the rest of the night.
He was oversensitive; he was moody. I could never argue with Adriane’s complaints on this front, as I could never tell her the truth, that I didn’t mind. And not just because it was one of the things that made him Max, but because it was one of the things that made me want him to be mine.
I’d had friends before Adriane and Chris, friends that had fit seamlessly with me because we were the same. We’d worried; we’d obsessed; we’d sought out dark clouds; we’d shared secrets and we’d kept plenty to ourselves. We’d been best friends until my brother’s accident, and then we hadn’t been friends at all, because after Andy, I couldn’t handle any more dark clouds and I didn’t want to share any more secrets. After Andy, I wanted easy, and that was Adriane, and that was Chris. They believed in surfaces and taking things as they seemed. They believed life was simple and good—and they willed it to be true. They laughed, they spilled their secrets as if it were nothing, because it was, and they didn’t ask questions. They’d been easy when I’d needed easy, and if I couldn’t be like them, they’d at least taught me how to pretend.
Max, on the other hand, was hard. Convoluted and cloudy, full of things I wasn’t supposed to ask and places I knew better than to go.
With Max, I didn’t have to pretend.
Foolish? Selfish? Your words wound, especially as I know you have borrowed them from our Mother. Is it foolish to deny Johannes Leo, when he could do so much for us? Is it selfish to deny our Mother the life at court to which she once grew accustomed, and which our Father’s crimes denied her? Perhaps it should little matter that Johannes stinks of the tobacco oil he vainly rubs on his skin, that his hands are clammy as fish scales, and that he cares as little for Cicero or Dante as a rabid dog does for water. But matter it does.
I offer you rational arguments, but my choice goes beyond reason. There is no choice. Thomas belongs to me, and I him. And if our precarious state so concerns our Mother, then perhaps she should dry her tears and contribute to its improvement. It is a daughter’s duty to serve her mother, and I have done so with pride. But if our survival is my responsibility, then surely deciding our course also falls to me. I honor our Mother, but I cannot cede my will to hers. Not when the sacrifice is so great.
It was the translation problem again, or maybe its inverse—because we used the same word, everyone used it, no matter the language, amour, amo, amore, Liebe, love, but it was impossible to believe that what she felt for Thomas bore any resemblance to what Max and I had together. How could it, considering the centuries that separated us—and not just centuries, but cars, computers, movies, cell phones, safe sex, Oprah, feminism, gay marriage, condoms, free love, revolutions sexual and otherwise. How could love have any meaning at all, if it meant the same thing through all of that? Elizabeth’s paeans to love were dated a couple years after Romeo and Juliet was first published, half a continent away. Say what you want about all the sulking, stalking, and pointless suicides in literature’s supposed great love affair, but what could love have meant before Romeo and Juliet? Not to mention Pride and Prejudice, Gone with the Wind? I hated romance novels, romantic comedies, and moony love songs with equal passion—but I wasn’t stupid enough to think I could ignore them. I believed in happily ever after as much as anyone, because Jane Austen, Prince Charming, and Hugh Grant promised me it could happen.
But maybe that particular delusion was universal.
E. J. Weston, to her dearest brother John Fr. Weston.
Aristotle teaches us that nature abhors a vacuum. But he discounts the emptiness left in the absence of love. Nothing will fill the hole Thomas has left behind, not air, not aether, not God.
You advised me of what would come if I gave him my heart. Advice which I disregarded, for I am a fool.
There is nothing left now, nothing but the machine, confirming beyond doubt that justice has departed this world. And, though it pains me to say, I am tempted to believe that God has departed as well. Certainly he has abandoned me, and in this, perhaps justice is served.
I—
My words have abandoned me as well, it seems.
Farewell.
23 March 1599 Prague.
So Thomas had left her behind, alone. She had given him her heart and, apparently, he’d taken it with him as a parting gift. Abandoning her like her father, like her God, like her hope. And she blamed herself.
Beside me, Max was paging through his dictionary, eyes slit in concentration, shaggy hair wild. I poked his arm, lightly enough to convince me that he was solid and still there.
“What?”
“Nothing.” I was tired of this game, comparing myself to a dead girl. I didn’t want to think about the meaning behind the words anymore, what it felt like, what was left behind. “Just, hi.”
“Hi.” Max brushed a strand of hair out of my face and let his hand linger at my temple, just above the skin. His smile was equal parts irritated and bemused. “Can I go back to work now?”
“Go.”
I watched him work. Then shuffled my papers, flipped through my notebook, pantomimed productivity, watched him some more.
Elizabeth was silent for weeks. When she did write again, it was only to ask after her brother’s health or his studies, everything about his life, nothing about hers. Nothing about Thomas, or about the “machine” and what she was planning to do with it. Nothing until the lett
er I’d already read, the one that led to the hidden pages in Petrarch. After that, over the course of more than a year, there were only a few scraps of correspondence, colorless descriptions of legal matters and a perfunctory report of what would come next.
Johannes Leo has promised patience and agreed that the wedding will be at least two years hence. It defies my imagination that there can be happiness left in the world, and yet Johannes Leo’s face fills with light in my presence. I know our Mother will derive great joy from the security of our union. Perhaps you will as well. As for me, I have learned to tolerate the scent of lilacs, as I will learn to tolerate the touch of his hand. I have discovered what fills the vacuum left by love. It is called necessity, and it will not be denied.
This time, when I nudged Max, he didn’t look up.
23
I saved the final letter until I was alone. It had been a long time since I’d come to the church by myself at night. Max didn’t like me going without him. He didn’t have to say why. We never talked about the night of the bloody broken window, but neither of us had forgotten it. The protectiveness was sweet, if worth more in theory than in practice; he couldn’t take even a fake punch without wincing.
Fortunately, I could take care of myself.
The lamplight sheathed the office in a soft orange glow, and a steady hiss of heat issued from the clanking pipes. Though frost crusted the windows, the office was warm. I’d told myself that I just wanted to say goodbye to her on my own, a silly sentimental gesture toward the girl who, in a way, had brought Max and me together. But the truth was, I’d seen Elizabeth’s bio. I knew where her story ended.
E. J. Weston, to her dearest brother, it began, as they all had.