Adam stayed on, sampling meze and listening to Theo tell an unflattering story about Marshall Bruce’s soon-to-be ex-wife (Anoushka, who had met her once on a photo shoot in Cape Cod, said that tale was untrue and that Mrs. Bruce was charming). He wondered whether Ellie was outside on the phone to Marshall. At half past eleven Theo produced a comically oversize pocket watch and rapped it impatiently, like the White Rabbit.
“Tell Madam we had to go, the guest list shuts at midnight. She’ll be back soon, I’m sure, but we can’t wait any longer.”
“Where are you off to?” Adam asked, confused.
“We’ve got tickets to a gig at the Ivy Club; we’ve got to get over to Covent Garden,” Anoushka explained. From beneath the table she produced a slim patent leather handbag. “Will you hang on to Ellie’s stuff?”
“Is she definitely coming back?”
“Oh yes,” said Theo, adjusting his hat in the tarnished mirror across the bar. He snatched the small bag from Anoushka and flipped it open, reached in, and produced Ellie’s enamel cigarette case. “Her beloved coconut sweeties are in there, see? She’ll be back. So sorry to leave you here, we’re such ungracious little things. But what a pleasure to meet any friend of Miss Ellie’s. Tell her we said happy Vee Day.”
They were all standing now—Chris was even taller than Adam had imagined from his seated frame, looming over Theo who looked positively Lilliputian beside him, at eye level with the graphic photograph of Ellie that was stretched over Chris’s pectorals. Anoushka tugged at her skirt, which had bunched and ridden up over pudgy stockinged thighs. “Send her our love,” she said, and the three of them began to make their way out through the crowded bar, having left on the table a patently inadequate contribution to the bill. Adam sat down again, this time on the velvet sofa that the others had vacated. It had suddenly become the moment he’d expected, waiting for her alone, drink in hand and heart in mouth. The evening could begin again.
“What the hell did you say to them?” asked Ellie when she returned. In the short interim, other larger parties had expanded from the tables on either side of Adam and had appropriated the stools, one by one; she sat down next to him on the sofa.
“I told them they were in the way.”
“That’s right. They were.”
“They were going to a gig. Weren’t you meant to be going with them?”
Ellie wrinkled her nose as if the very suggestion were distasteful. “Nope. I loathe that atonal, experimental horseshit that Theo’s obsessed with, I have more than enough dissonance in my life without listening to it. It’s like the Emperor’s New Clothes but without the diversion of male nudity to keep me awake. Never.”
“I don’t know anything about it, to be honest.”
“Nothing to know. Pretentious Royal College graduates up on a stage gratifying themselves, and only themselves, by making a freaking racket. They always look overcome with a sort of masturbatory self-satisfaction at their own supposed creativity. Half the time they have their backs to the audience and just gaze in adoration at each other.”
A vague recollection stirred. “Didn’t your father play professional jazz saxophone?” Adam asked her.
“Whether Boaz has ever done anything professionally is up for debate. But he certainly plays a lot. At sea, on land, it’s always playtime for Boaz. Did you meet my father ever?”
“Once, a long time ago.”
What he did not say was that he had met her mother that day too—Boaz and Jackie had come to the synagogue and given a challah-baking lesson to Adam’s Sunday school class, a young, happy couple who had seemed so old to seven-year-old Adam, though they could not yet have been thirty. As the baker’s daughter Jackie had led the class and while she kneaded had taught them phrases in Yiddish that she said were too rude to repeat to their parents; Boaz had been her assistant, had made jokes and pulled faces, and had shaped his dough into a heart that he had presented to his giggling wife, who kissed him in front of the whole class while the boys had made vomiting noises. Adam’s challah had been more like a pancake, he remembered; he had been too ashamed to take it to show Jacob when they’d gone to visit him at the hospice later that day. Adam had been baking challah with his father for years—he should have been able to do better for him, he’d felt.
“A long time ago sounds about right. Anyway.” She sat back and closed her eyes, pulling at one of her heavy false eyelashes. Adam winced. Her eyelid flickered as she stretched it; the thick, spidery fronds began to peel away slowly. “So now you’re speaking to me again, it seems.”
“I was never not speaking to you.”
“I’m not sure that’s strictly true, but we’ll let it pass for now.” She opened her eyes and regarded him. One set of the lashes was now in her hand like a small black comb. Without it her face looked strangely distorted, her eyes vastly different sizes as if she were a Picasso portrait of herself. She set to work on the other side. “So how was Israel with the perfect family?”
“Fine. A little strained, to be honest.”
“Why strained?”
“Rachel asked me if I was in love with someone else,” he said, bluntly. This statement coincided with her detaching the second set of eyelashes and so he could not identify the source of the brief discomfort that flashed across her face. He took a deep breath. “Only she was asking about someone, this girl Kate—”
“Ah yes, her great rival from college,” Ellie said, but now that he had started to speak he would not let her divert him with mockery and he continued, tense but determined.
“Look, obviously I’ve not even thought about that girl for years. It’s bullshit.”
She nodded, almost imperceptibly, but did not look back at him. On a chain round her neck she wore a slim gold ring and was sliding it on and off each finger in turn.
“I can’t stop thinking about you,” he said, and somehow despite everything it was just so easy to say it, so simple. The rest came out in a rush. “I’ve been trying to stay away from you since Christmas and just stop—but then I saw you yesterday and it was like—I realized how impossible it is for me to stay away from you.” His own ineloquence was maddening and with it the certain knowledge that when he relived this speech later, too late, the right words would flow, simple and powerful. But he had finally reached his point and he concluded with a sudden rush of triumph, “I want to be with you. I know it’s a mess and I know—I don’t know how it could even ever happen or how you feel although I think, I hope—I, I know that you feel something. And I can’t marry Rachel and feel the way I feel about you. I want to be with you. If there’s even a chance it’s what you want.”
“But, Adam,” she said, and the sweetness when she spoke his name was unbearable, “that’s impossible.”
He had expected protest at this point but had thought no further. Now he prepared to convince her. Logic and romance were both on his side; you must not dream of one woman and marry another. It is noble to follow your heart. She needed him. We must be together because we must.
“Why?”
“Do you really need me to tell you that?”
“Yes,” he said stubbornly. “Nothing is impossible. Things are difficult—so, so difficult, I can’t even imagine but, but not impossible. Just, we have to try. If it’s what you want.”
With one finger she began to stroke the deep ruby velvet of the sofa back and forth; dark to light; rough to smooth. “You’ll probably think I’m a psycho but I swear I knew you, I saw who you were, that very first time I met you. I’ll never forget it. You were standing there with Rach with her enormous duffel bag on your shoulder like it was nothing and you kept making her laugh, and you both just looked so—You know, I don’t think she even knows how safe you make her feel when you’re beside her. How could she, I guess? She’s got nothing to compare it to. But I saw the way you looked at her.” She began to draw slow circles in the nap of the fabric. “And then I think maybe I—we could be happy together. And I haven’t ever really been happy, I don’t
think. I don’t really do happy. Not like she is all the time. But ultimately I’m telling you—that’s the point. You’re going to protect Rachel, just like everyone always does, and you’ll do what’s right for everyone. You know you have to. God knows she wouldn’t know what had hit her if you didn’t. So I’ll follow your example and learn to be a good girl, and you’re going to forget me and marry my darling cousin.” She raised her head and looked at him, steadily. “But if things were different I would try—I would be with you, if I could. It probably doesn’t help to say, but it’s true.”
Adam thrilled. If this was true, and he no longer doubted that it was, then she could be convinced.
“I can’t marry Rachel,” he said again. Over and over in his head he was hearing Ellie say “I would be with you if I could.” I would be with you if I could. I would be with you if I could. He had heard nothing else.
“You’re only saying that now. We both know that’s not true.” Ellie sounded gentle but there was a warning in her voice that told him not to make false promises. Even as he had spoken he had begun to see that she was right. He still believed he couldn’t marry Rachel. But he felt equally certain that he couldn’t not marry Rachel, either.
“This is a nightmare.”
She smiled. “You’ve had an easy life if this is the worst thing that’s happened in it.”
He looked away, hurt. “This is not,” he said deliberately, “nor could it ever be, the worst thing that’s happened in my life. My father died when I was eight”—the same age as you were when your mother died, he added silently, have you never realized? Have you never thought about it?—“and there you have it, the worst thing that could happen happened and nothing will ever be that painful again. But that’s the whole point—life is so short. If you really mean that you’d be with me, then be with me. I’m not going to marry Rachel.”
“I know that life is short.” She dropped the ring she’d been playing with and with one finger began to trace the wishbone of blue veins on the back of her left hand. “Just as I know that you think it’s too short to hurt the people you care about. Be practical. You don’t mean that you can’t marry her. You’re going to. You’re going to marry Rachel and give her the perfect life that she expects.”
“I do mean it.”
“You don’t.”
He breathed deeply for a moment. “I don’t.”
“I know.”
And then she reached up and laid a cool palm against his cheek, touching him for the first time, tracing the line of his jaw with her fingertips. His skin burned as if she had touched him everywhere; he felt certain there must be a blazing handprint on his cheek just as surely as if she’d slapped him. He took hold of the hand near his face and, turning, pressed her wrist to his lips. He heard her sharp intake of breath and in a moment she had drawn away. The urge to have her was almost unbearable.
“This is bullshit, we should go. Or—I should go.” She sounded calm, as she always did, but he saw now that her eyes were alight.
He glanced at his watch. “Stay here till midnight. Start Valentine’s Day with me.”
“Valentine’s Day? God, you really are conventional,” she said, but with tenderness. “Okay. I’ll stay the … twelve minutes.”
“Okay.”
“Okay.”
A silence fell between them, lost beneath the din of the crowd and the throb of a pounding beat. Ellie watched the clock above the bar. Adam watched Ellie, a dull ache building beneath his ribs. He glanced away only when his phone beeped.
Happy Valentine’s Day from Paris!!! Missing u like crazy. The girls send love. Being at hen made me think, if u want 2 make wedding smaller lets do it. I just want u there, I don’t care about anyone else. Being married more important than wedding. Smaller and sooner, if u want. Kisses xxx r
Adam stared at this message for a long time before he set down his phone. Now it was Ellie who reached for his hand, gently, and he did not pull away. With her fingers she traced circles, feather-light, in his palm. A charge of electricity surged up his spine. “Rachel is a very lucky woman,” she said, softly.
18
The marriage of a Jewish son is a bittersweet prospect. There is relief, always, that he has navigated the tantalizing and plentiful assemblies of non-Jewish women to whom the children of the Diaspora are inevitably exposed: from the moment he enters secondary school there is the constant anxiety that a blue-eyed Christina or Mary will lure him away from the tribe. Jewish men are widely known to be uxorious in all the most advantageous ways. And so each mother fears that, whether he be short and myopic, boorish or stupid or prone to discuss his lactose intolerance with strangers, whether he be blessed with a beard rising almost to meet his hairline, he is still within the danger zone. Somewhere out there is a shiksa with designs on her son. Jewish men make good husbands. It is the Jewish woman’s blessing as a wife, and her curse as a mother.
But that is the outward fear, and the one to which they will admit. After all, who doesn’t believe in continuity? Who doesn’t fear cultural dispersion, collective forgetting, assimilation? Such concerns are forgivable and expected. But beneath them are murmurs of a more complex ambivalence. For when a son does it right and chooses, early, a good girl like Rachel Gilbert with a good family and good, symmetrical features, a different fear whispers into the sleepless nights of the woman who raised him. A shiksa might keep him apart from his community and feed him shellfish and make their children, God forbid, celebrate Easter—that day when a historical scapegoathood was cemented forever by the singing of Roman hammers on iron nails—but a nice Jewish girl, if she’s nice enough, holds deeper terrors. If she’s all that they dreamed of for their beloved boy, she might make the mother redundant. If she cooks and she reads to the children she bore him and she picks up his underpants and remembers the cousins’ birthdays and on top of that she’s there in the bedroom where you have never been and can never go, then what’s left? She’s won. You may have created him but it is she who gets to reap the benefits.
Adam’s mother, Michelle, had thought about it a great deal, and with much shame, for she loved Rachel. She knew she had it lucky—Rachel Gilbert was the envy of all her friends—the dream daughter-in-law, who loved her boyfriend’s mother and never so much as peeped in complaint when Michelle rang Adam at midnight to say that she couldn’t stop her computer from typing in italics, or that the Sky+ had stopped recording halfway through the second episode of Vanity Fair reruns. But she had lost her beloved Jacob almost twenty years ago this summer, and Olivia was wonderful of course but her darling, eccentric Olivia was a girl, and that she’d still never had a boyfriend was a constant source of worry rather than solace. You never lost a daughter when she married. But Adam was the only man in her life.
In some ways it was hard not to envy Elaine Press. Back when the children had been teenagers they had all felt a little sorry for her; they had seen it coming of course, and the sweet, open boys they’d raised had been concerned only that their school friend Gideon should feel comfortable enough to confide in them what they had always known anyway. (If you’re going to come out as a sixteen-year-old, then Jewish North London, with its endearingly quaint guitar-strumming, “Kumbaya”-singing liberal youth movements, is the place to do it.) But if the sons had taken it in their stride, in those days the mothers had felt sad for Elaine and Roger. Life as part of any minority becomes more difficult (God knows the Jews can relate to that), and grandchildren had seemed impossible once he confessed that girls weren’t for him. But these days Elaine Press was flourishing. Instead of having Gideon on a time-share with another woman she had actually gained the devoted Simon Levy, and if there were to be no grandchildren (of which Michelle was by no means certain, given how long the boys had been together and the increasingly favorable adoption laws), then Elaine at least had the solace of a guaranteed life partner for golf and—thanks to Simon Levy’s mother living in Glasgow—an unrivaled role as matriarch in a family of men. Jacob had wanted another b
aby—would it have been so terrible to have had a third child, to have had a boy who liked boys? To have had one man in her life she would never have to part with?
Despite Michelle’s conflicting emotions, however, in the end Adam’s wedding was widely acknowledged as a tremendous success. Whatever ambivalence she had felt in the hours preceding it, when the two families had stood together beneath the chuppah she had known that her baby was in the right place. Rachel Gilbert adored him; Lawrence and Jaffa could not have loved their new son-in-law more if he had been their own flesh and blood. She saw what they had given him and it softened the vicarious envy she’d always felt at Jacob’s absence; in Lawrence, Adam had support and a mentor for life. It could never take away what he had lost but it had filled a different space and buoyed him through the times when Jacob should have been there for shouts of praise, gentle censure, shoves of encouragement. The Gilberts were a family who rallied round—with this allegiance she knew that nothing would ever happen to her, or to Adam or Olivia, that Lawrence Gilbert would not put heart and soul into fixing. Adam had done a wonderful thing for all of the Newmans, not only for himself.
Throughout the many years of their children’s courtship Michelle Newman and Jaffa Gilbert had not always seen eye to eye, but on this occasion Michelle had had to concede that Rachel’s mother (under the conscientious and painstaking management of Rachel herself) had arranged a beautiful wedding. They could all be proud. Jaffa’s more flamboyant Middle Eastern tastes had been successfully reined in—on the bride’s suggestion, for example, they had offered the dill-poached salmon and the roast beef as alternatives rather than nestling together on every plate and had forgone the reusable silk flowers that she had thought so classy and practical (“Motek, they look just like real only not with the smell, and this is nothing, this you can fix with a little schpritz of something, and you can keep them forever. Beautiful! People can take, they can keep and remember the wedding! You and Adam can put them in the house”). Instead, the ballroom had been fragrant with Madagascar jasmine, and huge puffs of hydrangeas had softened and scented every surface like creamy snowballs. The grand master of kosher catering, a man whose name was virtually synonymous with having a “do,” had arranged equally delicate petals of sushi on clear platters for the canapés: there were heart-shaped salmon rolls on beds of pansies with pink tongues of tuna sashimi laid plumply between them. For the generation who had not kept pace with the Japanese food revolution they had served fish balls and chopped liver on crackers, and the waitresses had been instructed to keep the unfashionable food circulating only among the elderly. Glass plates and edible flowers for the young people; silver platters and doilies for the old. Everyone was happy.
The Innocents Page 16
