“What is your name again?” Humphrey asked, sitting at the foot of her mattress.
“Tooly.”
“Who you are?”
“Shut up,” she said, smiling.
“You remind me of Leibniz.”
“Of who?”
“German philosopher from years 1700 and after. He has messy haircut like you also, and dies after foot stuck in avocado.”
“How do you die from an avocado?”
“If you cannot understand, I’d rather don’t explain. If you are not intellectual, is not my business.”
She shut her eyes, entertained, then stood right there on the mattress, stretched her arms toward the ceiling, squeaked. “I walked a pig today,” she said. “Or yesterday. When is it now?”
“Tomorrow. Now go wash,” he told her. “I have items to discuss.”
She knew this ruse well. He wanted company, had been lonely overnight without her, probably waiting up till after midnight, listening for the door. They had lodged together for years, sharing homes in a dozen cities. The cause of each move had been Venn. Abruptly, he’d be leaving town and invited Tooly to meet him a few weeks later in his next city (best not to travel all together). Humphrey liked to accompany her, no matter how this complicated matters — all his books to ship! In some cities, Tooly met up daily with Venn, and was his companion, confidant, ally. He even cooked for her sometimes, or took her out with his associates, guys who would otherwise have snubbed her but whom he silenced to let her speak. He and she might walk for miles, people-watching and kidding around — such vivid periods, those were, that days passed and she read not a word. At other times, it was just Humphrey for weeks.
She showered and, given the late hour, got right into her pajamas. Humphrey awaited her at the Ping-Pong table, the right pocket of his slacks stuffed with balls to save himself stooping when one bounced away — if any shot required rapid movement, he called it “out.”
“It’s not out just because you don’t bother returning it, Humph.”
“If not then,” he asked, “when?”
But after just two points he put down his paddle and returned to the couch. “We need to go somewhere else.”
“Go where?”
“We go somewhere civilized together. Why,” he continued, “we must follow Venn always?”
“What would you and me do,” she teased, “if we went our own way?”
“Like now: items and activities.”
“Ping-Pong, reading, and chess?”
“What more there is in life?”
“And where, even if we had money?”
He looked at his shoes.
“Come on, Humph. Don’t get mad at me.”
“This is most stupid thing.”
“What is?”
He found no cause for anger, so became low. “Don’t be exasperate with me.” Humphrey toed his way through heaps of reading material, picking up decrepit works and dumping them on the couch. He sat heavily, books leaping from his impact and landing open, as if waking with a start. Fingers laced over his belly, he turned to her. “Sit, sit.”
She was on the verge of doing so when he raised his hand with alarm. “You nearly sit on John Stuart Mill!”
She removed the volume by this esteemed gentleman, then plopped herself on whosoever happened to have the misfortune to remain under the shadow of her bruised backside. “Don’t care if it’s Plato or Aristotle.”
“Is not my fault you are not intellectual,” he lamented, and handed her a copy of the closest book to hand, The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig.
Since they met more than a decade earlier, Humphrey had supplied her with books in this random fashion. Works on the Bronze Age, the cosmos, the First World War, the Renaissance, Greek myths, the race to build the atom bomb, Roman emperors, Voltaire and Locke, Muhammad Ali and David Niven, architecture, diaries of the infamous, gambling scams, economics, Groucho Marx. They passed thousands of hours pleasantly page-turning together, he determining which facts and mystifications were to constitute her education.
Only one form of book did Humphrey disdain: made-up stories. The world was far more fascinating than anyone could imagine. In made-up stories, he contended, life narrowed into a single tale with a single protagonist, which only encouraged self-regard. In real life, there was no protagonist. “Whose story? Is this my story, with my start and finish, and you are supporting character? Or this is your story, Tooly, and I am extra? Or does story belong to your grandmother? Or your great-grandson, maybe? And this is all just preface?”
“I’m not having kids.”
“Sure you are. And then whose story? Your grandson’s? Even what we say now, this is only background to his story, maybe. What about that? No, no, no — there is no hero. There is only consciousness and oblivion. Nothing means anything.”
“Nothing?”
“Be afraid of people who say there is meaning from life. Meaning only comes when there is ending.”
“I don’t agree with that.”
“Because you read too many tall stories when you are short girl. You believe things end in beauty. You think loose strings tie up.”
“Not necessarily.” She stretched out on the couch, stuffing her socked feet under him for warmth. “Did you talk to anyone yet today?”
“Many persons.”
“Who?”
“John Stuart Mill, for example. Also Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Maybe you hear of them?”
“I don’t count dead philosophers. And before you tell me those aren’t philosophers but eighteenth-century thinkers, then—”
“John Stuart Mill not even born till nineteenth century, darlink.”
“Did you talk out loud to anyone today?”
“I talk to you now. Are you not counting as twentieth-century thinker?”
“Not sure I qualify as a great thinker of the twentieth century, no.”
“Whatever century you are not a thinker in, I talk to you. Satisfied?”
She grabbed him around the middle. He fought weakly to escape, Ping-Pong balls popping from his pockets, bouncing everywhere. “How long cuddling must last?”
“Torture, is it?” She knew herself to be the last person on earth who still embraced this musty old man. She gave him a peck on the cheek.
“Incredible what I put up with around here,” he grumbled. “I wouldn’t believe, if I did not see it with my own ears.” He looked at her. “Tooly, I must tell you serious items.”
“Items and activities?”
“Stop teasing. I have things to say.”
“About?”
“About …” He stood unsteadily, turned as if caged, took his seat.
The history of Humphrey was a convoluted one. In certain accounts that she had heard, he’d escaped the Soviet Union as a young man and left his parents behind, never to see them again. But in another story he was playing poker with his father, mysteriously present in South Africa. Confusing the situation were myths that circulated: that he’d lived in China and worked for Mao (too industrious to be credible); that he’d been a croupier in Macao (surely not — his arithmetic was abysmal); that he’d dealt in stolen penicillin in postwar Vienna (he did seem to know a lot about pharmaceuticals); that he was privately rich (no evidence of this); that he was destitute (ample signs); that he was a Jewish aristocrat whose Mitteleuropa family had lost everything in the war (there was nothing aristocratic about the man).
According to Humphrey himself, he grew up in Leningrad in the 1930s, in a secular Russian-Jewish family. Like most Soviet citizens, they suffered appalling privation during World War II. However, wartime constituted something of a gap in his tale. One of his chess friends when they lived in Marseille, a rabbi who’d served two years in prison on a charge of money laundering for a Colombian drug cartel, once asked Tooly what sort of war Humphrey had had. “He’s a Jewish person from Europe,” the rabbi noted. “He’s the right age. In my community, you often don’t know what sort of a war they had till after they die. Then someone mentions something at the funeral.”