The Pale of Settlement Read Online Free PDF Page B

her at the end of that year, a few days after they finished their exams. They were sitting in Central Park watching the sun drop behind the apartment buildings on the Upper West Side. He turned to face her and placed his hand on her knee.
    I know this changes everything, he said. But I wanted you to know how I feel.
    Susan said she needed to think it over, and for the next two and a half years, she thought it over, until it came to seem that they had, in fact, gotten married and were already contemplating divorce. She had a dream in which she was standing in full white bridal dress alone on a stage in the center of an enormous stadium, surrounded by a crowd of strangers. The ring on her finger was as big as a bracelet and made of steel. She stood searching in vain for her ex-boyfriend, thinking, This isn’t the way it was supposed to be.
    Even now, looking back, Susan was never quite sure how they lost each other, how the familiar became strange, the way even a common word starts to sound foreign if you repeat it too many times out loud. Gravity failed them, after all. Even so, in the last months, before she finally moved out, and before he left for Berlin, she kept imagining that if he’d just ask her to marry him again, everything would be okay, but he never did.
    Not long after her ex-boyfriend’s baby was born, Susan met a Swedish artist at a party and let him take her home with him. His loft was filled with the heads of angels, molded in rough clay. They gazed down with wide, vacant eyes, tilted gently toward one another as if dreaming or entranced. In candlelight diffuse with clay dust, the sculptor covered her body with fluttering kisses. He had a long body, fair skin, eyebrows so pale they were almost invisible. His blond hair swung forward over Susan’s face as he moved. With a tremor of what she took to be excitement in his voice, he told her it was the first time he’d ever slept with a Jewish girl.
    Susan’s ex-boyfriend called from his parents’ house in Washington, D.C. He was there for a week with the baby, visiting.
    I wish you could meet her, he said. She’s a big part of my life, now.
    Susan flew down the following Saturday morning. She’d cut her hair, and as the cab pushed through the traffic on Massachusetts Avenue, she wondered if she looked different. They hadn’t seen each other in almost three years.
    Her ex-boyfriend stepped out onto the front stoop as the cab pulled up. He was holding his daughter on his hip. Her ex-boyfriend had brown hair and eyes, like Susan, but the baby had white-blond ringlets and eyes as blue as the sky. She looked like a Botticelli angel—as Aryan as you could get. Susan felt a sharp jolt of surprise.
    Say hi to Papa’s friend, her ex-boyfriend cooed. The child burrowed her face against her father’s neck. He stroked her curls and muttered some words in German that Susan couldn’t understand. It hadn’t occurred to her that the child would speak German, although it made perfect sense.
    The baby was fussy and cried when Susan held her, arching her back. Susan handed her back to her ex-boyfriend, feeling as though she’d failed some kind of test, and then they stood in the kitchen making conversation with his parents, just like in the old days. Susan wondered if his parents thought they might be getting back together again, and then she wondered if that was why she’d come.
    Finally, her ex-boyfriend put the child to bed, and they left her with her grandparents and went out to get Thai food.
    So what do you think? her ex-boyfriend said.
    Susan looked around at the gold embroidered elephants marching along the restaurant’s walls. She’s a cute kid, she said.
    I think she’s doing amazingly well, considering, her ex-boyfriend said. He picked at the label of his beer bottle, making a pile ofsoggy gold shreds beside his plate. He rolled the shreds between his fingers, looking down, concentrating, and