Jake was past his “years of YOU,” and it showed. He was about five years older than Leora and never seemed to think about himself, even by accident. It was obvious, for one thing, that he rarely thought of buying new shoes. He hardly remembered to comb his hair. Not only that, but he also didn’t seem to read newspapers or magazines—not even more serious ones. Whenever he met Leora somewhere, on their handful of dates, she always found him reading a book while waiting for her, usually a hardcover one in the generic brown binding of a university library, making it impossible to judge the book by its cover. He seemed completely unaware of current events. Leora always had to explain to him whatever it was she was working on that week for her magazine, as if she were talking to someone who had just landed from another country. Yet he always asked about what she was doing, and listened with rapt interest. One had the feeling, with Jake, that he was immune to trends, suspended in time; that unlike almost anyone else around her age, Jake could have been born in any era, in any place in the world, and would probably have turned out more or less the same.

His tiny one-room apartment, where she had recently been for the very first time, had two walls almost covered with ceiling-high shelves. On one side, the shelves were stuffed with academic books, history books, philosophy books, books in all sorts of languages. On the other wall, they were piled high with notebooks—small spiral notebooks, nearly all identical. But if you looked a little longer—as she had done on the evening before her first sleepless night, her first time in his apartment, when he had invited her over for dinner—you would notice that the peripheral shelves, the highest and lowest shelves just beyond the obvious places to look, were filled almost entirely with cookbooks.

“I see you’re a real chef,” she had said that evening from her perch by the bookcase, having been forbidden from going near the kitchen while he cooked.

“No, I’m a fake chef,” he answered back, stirring something in a frying pan. “Real chefs make things up. I just follow instructions.”