The Last of the Wise Lovers Read Online Free PDF Page A

 What's the
chance that a guy could get the wrong car, the wrong person, and relay a
message in Hebrew?"
       "Not
big," she concurred, "but there isn't anything that I have to
stop...”
       This I couldn't answer.
       "You see?  One can see
everything in a positive light if one is only willing to devote a little
thought to it...” she stroked my head.  "I suggest that we forget the
matter and not mention it again...”
       And we didn't mention it again,
because somebody made a noise near the front door.  I looked at Mom.
 She was silent, and only the nervous twitch of her eyelid gave away the
tension she might have felt.  I went to the door.  It was only the
postman, who had dropped three envelopes through the slot.  I picked them
up and put them on her bed.  She opened the envelopes and got lost in
reading a color brochure advertising cosmetics, with a picture of a big ship on
the cover.  I went to my room and lay down on the bed, dejected.  I
started thinking again about what had happened in the Lincoln Tunnel.  The
more I tried to believe that it had all been a joke or a mistake, the harder it
was for me to convince myself.  I didn't think that Mom had lied to me
when she had denied any involvement in the whole affair, I just thought that
she was trying to protect me from something that she would deal with in her own
way.
       Mom called to me from her room.
 "Look," she said when I got there, pushing the color brochure
to the end of the bed.
    "Dear Sir/Madam," it said on the front
page. "Have you ever wondered how we choose our products?"  The
logo on the envelope belonged to The Society for Proper Nutrition and Care of
the Body, from which Mom purchases her facial cleanser and other stuff.
       "So?" I said
absent-mindedly.  "They're always sending something."
       "Read it," she insisted,
"it's actually quite interesting."
       I went back to reading.  The
Society offered Mom membership in a group of preferred customers who would
report their opinions about the Society's products to the Marketing Department.
 In order to join the group she'd have to solve a small riddle.  Not
only was whoever solved the riddle correctly "not likely to force reality
to fit her perceptions, and therefore suited for the group" but she was
also likely to win a cruise to the Caribbean.
       The riddle was printed on the bottom.
 It really was interesting, and that's why I copied it onto a scrap of
paper that's been here in my room ever since: "Arrange the following nine
words into three meaningful sentences.  Make sure the sentences are logical,
and do not give in to the temptation to create sentences that will suit your
needs. Here are the words: fruit, is, isn't, sour, food, honey, sweet, is,
lemon."
       "There," Mom said
gleefully.  "I've already solved it."
       On the back of a different envelope
she had written the following sentences: "Honey isn't sour.  Lemon is
food.  Fruit is sweet."
       "That's not right.  It's
not logical," I said.
       "What's not right?"
       "Fruit isn't always sweet."
       "There's sugar in every
fruit."
       "But that doesn't mean it's
sweet.  According to your answer, an olive is sweet."
       "Fruit is sweet," she said
in that same voice of hers that always gets me to give in.
       The only way to show her that she was
wrong was to find another solution.  But I was too uptight, annoyed, and
even a little scared.  How was it, I thought, that everything that was
familiar and clear and obvious a mere 24 hours ago suddenly seemed so
uncertain, shaky?
       I passed the afternoon in thought,
too.  Suddenly I got this idea that maybe everything that had happened was
somehow connected to Dad's work.  Maybe that was why Mom didn't know what
it was about, and maybe that guy who had said what he'd said in the back seat
had just assumed that she knew something that Dad had told her.  I went back
to Mom's room.  She wasn't there.  The light was on and the book