Jake laughed to be polite. Yehudah, a smile lingering on his lips, lined up the three stones that had been judged best in cut and moved the others aside to form a constellation on the table. Three stars of Orion’s belt twinkled in a firmament of black velvet. “Now you’ll see what we mean by diamond color,” Yehudah said, speaking in his father-in-law’s voice: dismissive, professional, like a knife on a chopping block. “Look at these three. Which one’s the whitest?”

Jake looked at the three gleaming stones. The diamonds winked at him in turn, identical against the deep black velvet, each whispering at him—choose me, choose me, choose me. First one flashed whitest, then another, then the third. A sudden uneasiness crept into Jake’s stomach, as if he were competing in a spelling bee and had just been asked to spell a word he had never heard of. The unpronounceable word barbled in his throat. Still, he didn’t look up, staring at the stones, silently begging them for an answer. They laughed.

“You can’t tell, can you?” Yehudah asked.

Jake felt himself turning red again. “No.”

Yehudah smiled at him. “Neither can I. But now you will.” He reached over to the desk behind him, picking up a piece of white card stock folded into the shape of the letter M, and placed the stones in the white paper’s crease. As each of the diamonds landed in the crease, Jake watched, fascinated. The three diamonds, winking their identical winks against the black cloth, fell onto the white paper and changed colors as if stripped naked. The first sat tarnished on the paper, throbbing a bruised and tawny color; the second glowed a dim yellow like a dying gas lamp in an old painting. The last one, exposed and revealed, blazed burning white.

“See, you never know, out of context,” Yehudah said. “You just have no idea.”

Jake looked up from the glittering stones into the Mad Hatter’s blue eyes, and agreed.

BEFORE HE met her, Jake used to feel like the butt of that old joke describing a Rhodes Scholar: a bright young man with a brilliant future behind him. Ha ha. She was the first person in years who didn’t see him that way. He wanted to fall at her feet.

It was a night when they had come pretty close, a Friday night. Leora’s roommates were out of town, and they had spent the evening at her place having their own private sabbath dinner, singing the prayers together before retreating to her room for a screening of the original Planet of the Apes. After aping the apes, along with the human among them lost on his own planet, they took off most of their clothes, but not all of them. Jake asked her once more, but Leora still wouldn’t sleep with him.