I went over to the bookcase. “There used to be a bottle of scotch here,” I said, “but I suppose it’s long gone.”
“There’s liquor in the kitchen. Scotch? Or would you like some brandy?”
“Not brandy,” I said with a shudder. “Scotch will be fine.”
“You stay here,” she said. “I’ll get it.”
She came back with two glasses. I was about to ask her just when she started drinking whisky when two things occurred to me. One – it was none of my business what she did, and two – she was seventeen years past the legal drinking age. (I later found out they raised the drinking age to twenty-one while I was chilling out in Union City. She was really only fourteen years past it.)
“Little Minna,” I said, taking a glass. “Did you live here alone all the time?”
“Except when I was married.”
I almost dropped my drink. “You were married?”
“For two years, and we lived together for a year before that. At his apartment, in the East Village. But I kept this place, Evan, and when the marriage broke up I moved back.”
“You were divorced? What happened?”
“Things just didn’t work out.”
I took a long drink of scotch. I wondered how it would sit after all those years, but it went down just fine. I felt the glow spreading in my body, rich and warm. But the warmth didn’t seem to be reaching the bone-deep chill.
“Did they make you go to school, Minna?”
She shook her head. “I stayed home,” she said, “and I read the books, and I think I learned more that way than I would have learned in school. And of course I had jobs, because the monthly check wasn’t enough to live on.”
“What kind of jobs could you get?”
“In the neighborhood. Helping out in the shops, delivering for the liquor store, working at the newsstand when the Sunday Times comes out.”
“Assembling the sections.”
“That’s right. I was always available to work, because I didn’t have to go to school.”
“Handy,” I said.
“Yes. And then when I was seventeen I look tests and got my general equivalency diploma so that I could go to college.”
“You went to college?”
“At Columbia. I took some tests, and I guess my scores were good, because they gave me a scholarship. I majored in history, and then I got a master’s in comparative linguistics, and then went back to history for my doctorate.”
“You’re a doctor,” I said.
“Yes.”
“What did you choose for a thesis topic?”
“The reign of Mindaugas in Lithuania.”
“Your ancestor.”
“So they tell me.”
“If I’d been here,” I said, “I could have written your thesis for you. But I guess you did a good job of writing it yourself. And why shouldn’t you pick Lithuanian history as an area of expertise? You grew up speaking the language, and you’re going to be queen if the place ever gets its independence.”
“That’s what we always said, Evan. But now that Lithuania is independent, nobody has come knocking on the door to offer me a crown.”
Lithuania was independent? What was she talking about? The Soviets would never allow it.
“Little Minna,” I said again, for lack of anything better to say. “Little Minna the Doctor. Only you’re not so little anymore.”
“I grew,” she said. “Evan, I’m thirty-five years old. And you must be-” She broke off, frowning in puzzlement. “How old are you, Evan? Because you don’t look any older than the last time I saw you.”
“Oh,” I said, and tossed off the last of the scotch. “Well, it’s a long story.”
I told her all of it, or as much of it as I’d pieced together from my own knowledge and what I’d learned from Fischbinder and Westerley. Minna asked questions and made comments, and when I reached the end she gave me a long and thoughtful look.
“I asked how old you were,” she said, “and you didn’t answer, and now I understand why. Because it is a question without an answer, isn’t it, Evan? You were born sixty-four years ago, but it is more accurate to say that you are thirty-nine.”
“Like Jack Benny,” I said.
“I am thirty-five,” she said, “and you are thirty-nine. That is going to be very difficult to get used to.”
“You’re telling me.”
“When you are a child, adults are so much older that they inhabit a different universe. Then you grow up and the age difference is not so great, not so important. I have friends now who are fifteen or twenty years older than I. They were grown-ups when I was a child, but now we are all grown-ups and it is possible for us to be friends.”
“Yes.”
“But this is different. There really is hardly any age difference between us, Evan.”
“That’s true.”
“I always thought… promise you won’t laugh.”
“I promise.”
“I always thought you would marry me when I grew up. I believe it’s a natural fantasy for a child under such circumstances. But now I have grown up and you have returned and you are still a young man. It is very confusing.”
“I know.”
“In a few days,” she said, “I will find my own apartment.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. This is your apartment. You’ve been living here for the past thirty years.”
“But it’s your apartment, Evan. I kept it for you, with all your books and files. Everything is here for you.”
“And it’s a large apartment,” I said. “Lots of rooms, anyway, even if they’re not very big rooms. Certainly enough space for two people.”
“I suppose we can see how it works out.”
“It’ll work out fine,” I said, “and if it doesn’t work out, then I’ll be the one to move.”
“No, I’ll move.”
“No,” I said, “I will. It’s my apartment, so I get to decide who moves out of it. Except I really don’t see why either of us has to move. I think we’ll do fine here.”
“You can have your bed back,” she said. “I’ll be comfortable on the couch.”
“I think the bed should go to somebody who sleeps,” I pointed out, “and I don’t. When I need to stretch out and do my yogic relaxation, the couch is fine.”
“You still don’t sleep?”
“Not as long as my body temperature stays in the plus column. At least I don’t think I do. I’ve only been on my feet a couple of hours, so I wouldn’t be sleepy yet in any case.” I had a sudden image of Minna getting ready for bed – this new Minna, not the child I remembered – and I tried to blink it away. I turned aside, and there was the television set with its curious keyboard, and I snatched at it as a topic of conversation and asked her what the hell it was.
“It’s a Mac,” she said.
“A Mac?”
“Yes, a Macintosh.”
“A Macintosh. Isn’t that a kind of apple?”
“Yes, it’s an Apple Macintosh.”
“Don’t you mean to say it the other way around? A Macintosh apple.”
“Apple is the company,” she said, pointing to the corporate logo on the metal box that supported the TV set. “And Macintosh is the name of the product line. And this particular model is a Power Mac 6600.” And she went on to tell me a lot about it in a string of sentences that made no sense at all to me, using words like “modem” and “megahertz” and “hard drive” and “gigabyte.” That last got mixed up in my mind with the trilobite, the not uncommon fossil of a triform prehistoric creature, and I was trying to work that out when she said, “Evan, you don’t know anything about computers, do you? I guess they didn’t have them when you got frozen.”
“Companies had them,” I seemed to remember, “and there were these punch cards that you weren’t supposed to fold, mutilate, or spindle.”