Leora stepped back and sucked in her breath. She wanted to lunge at him, grab him, pound on his chest, shout at him that this wasn’t how things were supposed to happen. Men were supposed to reject you, of course, but they weren’t supposed to bring up the subject of marriage. They were supposed to be completely ignorant on the subject, almost unaware that it even existed, and you were supposed to clue them in with great subtlety—leaving diamond brochures in their underwear drawers, for example—until they at long last got the hint. And none of this was supposed to happen until you were at least twenty-eight. Men were not supposed to reject you at the age of twenty-one because they realized you weren’t going to be their wife.

She stood in front of him, feeling her lips beginning to tremble. But she pressed them together, swallowing before she spoke. “Because I’m not going to be your wife,” she said evenly.

“Yes, that’s right,” Jason answered, almost with eagerness, relieved that he didn’t have to explain it any further. His yarmulke was slowly migrating forward on his head, Leora noticed, and she wondered how long it would take before his yarmulke and his hairline finally met. “So I don’t think we should see each other anymore.”

Then Leora shouted. “Well, you’re just fucking full of surprises, aren’t you?” Jason stared at her, stunned. She continued. “What the hell happened to you, Jason? When did you ever ask me if I wanted to be your wife? When did you ever even care if I wanted to be your wife? Don’t you think you could have discussed it with me, if that’s what you had in mind? God, am I stupid. I thought you were my boyfriend. I didn’t realize that I was dating the Lubavitcher rebbe.”

Jason may have answered her, but Leora didn’t hear him. She asked him to leave, and he did. If Leora had been an ordinary girl, she might have called her friends and cried for hours and hours over Jason. Instead she fought back her tears and waited until she was sure he had left the building. Then she left the building herself and walked and walked, not knowing where she was walking, and not really caring, either. Her feet, well trained from the previous few weeks when she was studying for exams, took her to the university library. She opened the door and went inside. Some of the tables and desks were draped with lounging students in baseball hats, the unlucky few who still had exams left to take. She went into the reference room and began walking in slow circles along its edges, reading the titles on the bindings of all the different reference books. Circling the room this way was almost like circumnavigating the globe, watching the languages change from shelf to shelf. What she noticed most of all were the encyclopedias, entire encyclopedias for entire countries and religions and cultures she had never even thought about—at least, not since she was in high school. Suddenly she spotted a series that looked familiar. Pausing for a moment by the bookshelf, she selected a few heavy volumes from the shelves, carrying them with her in a colossal stack, and sat down with them at one of the reference room tables.