“Do you mind if I tell you something about yourself?” asked the little old man in the bookshop; which is by no means meant to be as dismissive a description as it sounds. Yes, littler than I and older than I, in suspenders and smart wool cap, but also rare and uncannily ablaze, my own Leopold Gursky and Zvi Litvinoff (I couldn’t help but think) living and breathing in one. We had come across each other in the open path between the shelves and had already covered an hour’s worth of topics: Dostoevsky, first; Tolstoy and Pushkin, Ralph Ellison (whom he had once known) and Leonard Bernstein (whom he hadn’t). Then the civil rights movement and the Russian revolution, chaos theory and the butterfly effect; even, somehow, Camelot and Ayn Rand and James Dean. And now, love. His eyes, colored pale, were already damp, having just told the story of his wife of 58 years, once the young blooming daughter of a Greek immigrant jeweler, and now he was looking at me, curiously profoundly, the way raveling and unraveling mean the same thing.
“I think you, too,” he said altogether serious, having struck upon something, “will love only once.”
“Oh, not like that,” he corrected with a broad stroke of his arm, “You love very much, and all the time, love. But!” he said and I could have laughed right there, so eerily I knew the words to come: “there are many different ways to love.” He smiled, all inclusively, fist thudding over his heart, “Like this, only once.”
“I would not say this to just anyone,” he offered, “but I look in your eyes and I see it. Not everyone is the same. Some can fall in love a hundred times. They may be the lucky ones, what do we know. But, my dear,” he said, tapping my wrist with the significance of it all, “you will see. There is never anyone before. And then, in one moment… fifty-eight years later you will walk into a room, see them just as you did this very first time, and your heart will not be able to contain it all. There is never anyone else.”
“And now I’m glad,” he said at last, with an exuberant triumphant smile, eyes shining just as before, “to see I have told you nothing you did not already know.”