Leora wondered whether she had left something in the room where he gave his speech, or if there were some other reason he had recognized her. She didn’t know why, but his voice made her nervous. Her fingers trembled slightly as she shuffled her notebook closed. “Yes,” she answered, “and you were the one who gave that lecture about excommunication, but I don’t remember your name.”

“Jake.” He shook her hand. He had nice fingers, she noticed; gentle, long and thin.

“I’m Leora.”

He smiled at her. His teeth had tiny spaces between them, which made her wonder whether he might be European. But his accent was American. “Are you a graduate student?” he asked.

She fumbled for an answer. “No, um, I’m, well, I’m a reporter for a magazine in New York, and I’m actually doing a story about drugs, unrelated to the whole Spinoza thing, but I saw a sign and I thought I’d stop by.” That was true, more or less. “I really liked your lecture.”

“Thanks,” he said, a little too enthusiastically. Leora wondered if anyone had ever complimented him on his lectures before. Clearly this should have been the end of the conversation, but neither of them moved. It was like some kind of cowboy standoff, each wondering when the other would draw. Close up, and without his suit and tie, Jake looked different from how he had looked during the lecture, much younger. There was something very fresh about his face, as if he were really a thirteen-year-old boy trapped in a body closer to thirty. Leora wanted to say something, but nothing came to mind.

“Is this your first time in Amsterdam?” she heard her own voice ask.

She watched Jake’s face relax, his mouth starting to smile. He seemed as relieved as she was to have something to say. “Actually I’ve been here lots of times. My mother was Dutch. One of those Dutch Jews who hated Spinoza, I guess.”

Leora scanned his clothing. A tucked-in, button-down flannel shirt, far too tucked-in, over rather eighties-ish unfaded jeans with yellowish-orange stitching on the pockets. Clearly he wasn’t living with a woman, unless it was his mother. But he had mentioned his mother in the past tense, or so it had seemed. Jake, she thought to herself, making the sort of random association that might seem profound to someone taking drugs, was a certain kind of name: the name of a kid in a children’s movie whose mother had died. Not any particular movie, of course. It was just a generic name for a motherless child in a sappy movie or TV show, in the same way that all children of divorced parents on TV shows have bowl haircuts. An industry standard. To her shock, though, she suddenly heard herself speak:

“I was just wondering: did your mother die when you were a child?”