ALIDA TAPPED on Tad’s door.
“Ali!” Sag-shouldered, puffy-eyed, Tad looked less like Tad than some character he was acting in a play, a man crushed by sudden bad news.
Frightened, Alida held out her arms for a hug, thinking that the hug would say more than the words she’d prepared. She clung to him for a moment: a + b, and a million miles from x.
“Ali.”
“You know what? The dogfish stuff? I got scared, but he didn’t mean to scare me, he was just telling me the truth, and I was being stupid and I scared myself, it wasn’t him, it was all me, he’s not like bad or anything, he’s…” Alida felt she wasn’t saying this right. It had sounded much better when she’d rehearsed it in her head.
“Oh, Ali. Right, and right, and right again. I got mad over nothing — nothing. I’m so sorry. It’s a lousy fact of life that sometimes people do get mad for no good reason at all. I had a sort of brain fart.”
“I had a brain fart today. I got really mad at Gail.”
“What about?”
“Nothing.”
“Weird, isn’t it, that nothing makes so many things happen? It’s so important it really ought to have a different name.”
Alida thought for a moment, then said, “Factor Zero?”
“I love you, Ali.”
“I love you, too.”
“Factor Zero. Now I have the word for it. I’ll always call it Factor Zero.”
“I have this idea,” Alida said, revealing her project to the world for the first time, “that everything is really algebra.”
“And you know what? I was always terrible at math in school.”
“Will you come to dinner tonight?”
“I’d love to come to dinner, but I promised Gilda — you remember Gilda?”
“Yeah, she’s the actress, right? She was with you in that play.”
“I have to take her out to a fancy meal in a restaurant. She’s going through a rough time. A lot of people are going through a rough time right now. It’s Factor Zero at work again.”
Leaving Tad’s apartment, Alida was reminded of kayaking — the giddy elation of being afloat and in control. She’d taken charge, she’d used her paddle right, her boat had skimmed safely over the yawning deeps below.
“I DON’T want to go.”
It was 9:30, and Lucy and Alida were snuggling in Alida’s narrow bed.
“Why, Rabbit?”
“I don’t know, I just don’t.”
“But yesterday you wanted to go so badly.”
“Yeah, but that was yesterday.”
Watching the troubled face beside her on the pillow, Lucy cast about for irresistible inducements. The whole weekend would be thrown out of balance if Alida stayed home. The invitation had been provoked by Alida’s eagerness to go kayaking again, not because Lucy had wanted more face time with her subject. It was essential that Alida come along. It didn’t help Lucy’s mental clarity that every muscle in her body ached from the Pilates class. She said, “You were getting so great at kayaking…”
“You can go. I can stay with Tad.”
Tad! Damn him! Alida had gone to his apartment after school and come back with an ambiguous Gioconda smile, saying nothing of what had transpired between them. Evidently they’d made a pact — Tad and Alida versus the Vanagses, like the Allies against the Axis powers.
But Lucy had to hide her anger. “Rabbit, it’s really important to me that we go together.”
“I don’t want to.”
“Try and tell me why.”
In a small voice, Alida said, “It’s because like…I think it might hurt Tad’s feelings.”
“Is that what he said?”
“No. It doesn’t have anything to do with what Tad said. It’s just how I feel.”
“Oh, Rabbit.” There was candid misery in Alida’s face now. “I promise you it won’t hurt Tad. Would it help if I talked to him?”
“No.”
“This is a you-and-me thing. We just can’t back out now.” Cradling her daughter, she remembered how, at her age, she’d felt physically torn apart in the intermittent Cold War between her parents. Her great ambition had always been to protect Alida from anything like that, and now Alida was suffering exactly as she had done.
“Is it really super-important?”
“Yes, but…” That but was the crucial word. Lucy realized that Alida had somehow, just recently, gained the power, the right, of refusal; it wasn’t that Lucy wouldn’t force her on this, it was that she couldn’t.
Alida suddenly smiled — exactly as she had when she returned from Tad’s apartment. “Okay, then. I’ll come.”
“Thank you, my darling.”
“I really do want to go kayaking again.”
Five minutes later, she was asleep. By ten, Lucy was back at the computer, continuing the research she’d begun earlier in the evening and plowing through the reader reviews of Boy 381 on Amazon.com. There were more than seven hundred of them, and it was dull, repetitive work. The book had an unblemished five stars, and the readers all said the same thing: they’d cried, they’d laughed, they’d stayed up all night to finish it, they’d missed their subway stops in their engrossment, Augie had changed their entire view of the world, they’d felt his pain, and so on, and on, and on. It seemed to be part of the house rules at Amazon that to praise a book you had to manifest an exaggerated physiological response — laughing till you cried, cracking up, weeping buckets, or, as a woman from Akron, Ohio, claimed, wetting yourself, choking for breath, depriving yourself of sleep, as if readers were competing for some emotional dysfunction award. Growing impatient with these displays of I-felt-it-more-deeply-than-anyone-else-did, Lucy clicked Next, and Next, and Next on each batch of ten reviews until boredom sent her over to Amazon.co.uk. Maybe the Brits had a different take on it.
Four stars over there, and there were only ninety-something reviews. She scrolled through them, not knowing what she was searching for until she found it: a review headed FRAUD by “A Reader from Thetford (See more about me),” written very shortly after the book came out back in 2005.
“I knew ‘August Vanags’ during the war years,” it began. “He was an orphan and a refugee, but spent most of the war living on my parents’ farm in Norfolk. I possess a copy of the very same photograph that is shown on the cover of his so-called ‘memoir.’ He is not in a refugee camp — he is standing in front of the part of the farm that my father fenced off in 1940 in order to raise chickens, as many people had to do after Lord Woolton was made minister of food. He was a very thin child because he suffered from coeliac, a wasting disease. He was always in and out of the Jenny Lind children’s hospital in Norwich, where he was treated for this condition. He was nowhere near Poland or Germany or any of the other countries described in his ‘book.’”
Lucy reached for the quote-unquote book and checked the inside back flap for the provenance of the picture. It said, “Jacket photograph of August Vanags (1945): Philip Cahan”—the name of the U.S. Army sergeant who’d rescued Augie in Germany at the war’s end.