After it came out of her mouth, Leora couldn’t believe she had actually said it. She wanted to crawl into a hole and die.

Jake turned bright red, an effect that in a strange way became him. His face matched the red pattern on his shirt. He choked and spit out his answer, softly: “Yes, she died when I was thirteen.”

He didn’t ask her how she had known, and she didn’t apologize—not for the question, and not for his mother’s death. Suddenly she was reminded of sitting with Bill Landsmann next to his father’s grave, of discovering someone else who had a hole in his heart, gaping like an open window. Was that really seven years ago? She felt uncomfortable for a moment, as if she had to go to the bathroom. The feeling passed.

“You’re a professor at Columbia, right?” She remembered reading that on the lecture list, though he looked a bit young to be a professor.

“Assistant professor,” Jake said, the color draining slowly from his face.

Leora felt herself reaching for another inappropriate question, even though she knew she shouldn’t. “Does it ever bother you,” she asked him, “that no more than six people in the entire world actually care about anything you write?” Once again, she could scarcely believe she had said it, but she took a sort of sick pleasure in anticipating the shocked look on his face.

She never got it. Instead, without even pausing, he rebutted: “Does it ever bother you that no one in the entire world actually cares about anything you write for more than six days?”

Leora swallowed and stepped back. Suddenly this encounter had changed from an exchange with a stranger to something entirely different. She thought of walking away, but felt as if she were rooted to the ground. Instead she changed the subject.

“What did you think of the conference?” she asked after enough seconds had passed.

Jake smiled, once more relieved. “It was fun, as things involving Spinoza go. People presented stuff pretty well. As for Spinoza’s ideas, though, between you and me I think it’s a cheap way out.”

Leora was thoroughly confused. “A cheap way out of what?”

“Well, let’s say you’re dissatisfied with your life, for good reasons. Things aren’t turning out for you the way you wanted or expected them to. There’s a war, you get a disease, your dog dies, whatever.”

Or your mother dies when you’re thirteen, she thought. But for once she kept her mouth shut. He continued.

“A traditionally minded person would have good grounds to reject religion at this point. God promises to take care of us. Then he doesn’t. The logical conclusion is that either God has betrayed us, or God never existed in the first place. The easier choice, of course, is to forget about God altogether.”

“So how is Spinoza a cheap way out?”