“But she’s not going, she’s staying in London.”
“No, of course she’s not. Her whole life is in New York, she can’t do anything here, and it was silly to stay away just because Marshall Bruce’s wife was threatening her with something she might never even do.” Rachel shook her head with an expression that looked, to Adam, like fond exasperation that he would believe something so outlandish. “Daddy said he will make sure that it’s not too terrible for her if that woman does try to do anything with her horrible list. She’s moving back next week. There was never really anything here for her to stay for.”
“I don’t understand.” Adam took a step backward away from her, away from the source of this revelation. He had a strange feeling in the pit of his stomach. “Lawrence—your dad told me the day before yesterday that she was staying in London.”
“Mmm. I suppose then she thought she was. But when I saw her last night at Granny’s house she told me she’s definitely going. It’s all sorted, she’s booked her ticket and told Balmain and everything—she told me that the tenant in her flat there only needs a week’s notice so she’s leaving the day after Yom Kippur. Once she goes back there”— Rachel paused to catch the silver chopsticks that had loosened and were falling out, swept her hair up again and then continued—“once she’s in New York again I can’t imagine she’ll come back.”
30
She wouldn’t take his calls. She wouldn’t answer his messages. And she wouldn’t leave Ziva’s side, so there was absolutely nothing he could do about it. He sat at the kitchen table staring miserably out of the window, the pile of blue and white paper napkins that Rachel had given him still untouched. He was meant to be rolling each one round a knife and fork and heaping forty of these cutlery sausages onto an ornate Moroccan tray, but so far he had done only three. Behind him Rachel was drizzling the icing over her lemon drizzle cake and humming snatches of Avinu malkeinu, which she’d said earlier was always stuck in her head from Yom Kippur almost until Succot. The Yom Kippur fast had just ended and any minute the doorbell would ring.
In the days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur Adam had had brief intervals of Buddha calm, when he had envisaged an almost telepathic connection with Ellie. By this means he determined that she had retreated into silence until he was free, and free to communicate honorably. So it was all better really, better that she was safely away from London and waiting for him while he found a way to leave. And leave he would.
But he veered from these moments to far, far longer periods of wild distraction. Because most of the time he did not feel calm, nor did he believe that nothing had changed. Most of the time he agonized over what might have caused her sudden and inexplicable silence, and why on earth she was going back to New York when her return was almost certain to bring about another cataclysmic series of revelations about her past.
Meanwhile he felt gripped by a coiled and threatening energy, battling the urge to stand outside Ziva’s house and bellow and demand that Ellie come down to him. All traces of sleep disappeared, and he could not even lie still long enough to pretend. He became obsessed with the idea of standing beneath her window and each night he would prowl the flat, wild-eyed, having the same conversation with himself—Ziva had the hearing of a cat, he would set off the security lights on the path and terrify her and then get caught; in any case Ellie’s bedroom was at the back. And in truth, the problem was not to attract her attention, for he could do that in multimedia. The problem was to make her answer him.
This evening’s Yom Kippur break fast at their flat, an idea that he had tried to veto without success, had now become the only bright spot on his horizon. Rachel had leapt at the chance to host her first real “do” as Mrs. Newman, though Adam had privately been troubled by the idea. What would people say when they looked back, after he’d gone? What would they think when they knew the truth? But he had been unable to offer Rachel a convincing reason not to do it, could not tell her that she would feel retroactive humiliation in this public role of happy hostess, and so it was all going ahead. Adam had the familiar sense that events were moving beyond his control.
The cake iced, Rachel had become a dervish of activity, wiping tables, arranging wineglasses, distributing bowls of mixed nuts and whipping off sheets of protective cling film with the confidence of a performing magician.
“The bagels and the challah are in the oven for the moment but I don’t want them to crisp so can you just keep an eye on them for a bit? And the smoked salmon is all plated up but I’ve left it in the fridge because I figured it should come out last. But do you think I’m right about the cheese?”
“What about it?”
Adam took his assigned place beside the oven. Now that it was happening he wanted, mawkishly but with fervor, for Rachel’s break fast to be a success. He tried to remember what she’d said about the cheese.
“What I asked you before. I think it should all be room temperature, no? So I took out the Brie and the other one and put them on the breadboard on the dining table and put the grapes out already in that nice mango wood bowl that the Londons gave us. But do you think the cheese is okay?”
Adam looked at his watch. “Yes,” he said decisively.
“Oh, good. In that case there’s room for the egg and onion to stay in, and the chopped liver. Or do you think they should be out now, too?”
“In,” he said firmly. He had no opinions. But what simple relief there was in solving problems, in offering solutions. Rachel looked up from washing her hands and smiled at him, then set off to deliver another platter to the sitting room. As she bustled past him, absorbed and purposeful, he had a sudden urge to kiss her. He bent to touch his lips quickly to her cheek but she clucked and kept moving, raising the tray of cold salmon fillets that she held and saying, “Ads, it’s heavy!” She had been zesting lemons for the cake and the scent mixed with the light citrus of her perfume.
A moment later he heard her call, “The bagels!” and so he took them out of the oven and began to arrange them in concentric circles as he knew she liked them, in a big wicker basket. He felt utterly transfigured, and yet the surface of everything was the same. Plain, sesame, poppy seed. Plain, sesame, poppy seed. Plain, sesame, poppy seed. Ellie was flying the following morning and after more than a week of silence his desperation had begun to feel like a mania.
The doorbell rang.
The first guests were Michelle and Olivia who arrived in the midst of a heated debate about whether it had been inappropriate for Michelle to try to make a shidduch with her daughter and the new rabbi during the very short pause between afternoon services.
“Darling, he’s perfect for you,” Michelle was saying, pausing briefly to kiss Adam hello. “He gave a very thoughtful sermon, he’s clearly an intellectual.”
“She corralled him on his way to the loo,” Olivia hissed to Adam, unwinding a violet mohair scarf from around her neck. “It was mortifying.”
Before the front door had closed behind them Tanya and Jasper Cohen arrived with Dan and Willa London, who had come straight from the Liberal synagogue and had bumped into them in the hall. With this batch of new arrivals there were already enough people to feel celebratory and Adam saw Rachel’s smile of relief as the machinery of the evening began to turn; Michelle gravitated to the kitchen to help with the final preparations and Dan, Willa, Jasper and Tanya launched unabashed into the cakes on the coffee table, with Rachel’s chocolate brownies nominated as the best morsel with which to break a fast. “Give Tanya the recipe,” Jasper bellowed, in Rachel’s direction.
“We met a friend of yours,” Tanya told Adam, ignoring Jasper, “Ezra, from New York. Zach Sabah put him in touch with Jas about helping with the accounts for a film scholarship thing he’s doing. He was in London. He said he knew you.”
“Oh?” said Adam. He swallowed.
“I’m not sure Jasper liked him to be honest, but I did. He seemed interesting. Small world, anyway,” she finished, considering him over the rim of her teac
up. Adam had nothing to say to this and nodded distractedly. He rose and returned to his post in the hall.
Linda and Leslie Pearl came next with the extended Pearls—Lawrence’s GGP partner Jonathan wearing an expression that Adam recognized from Lawrence and Tony in recent days, the careworn, beleaguered look of a man whose robust natural optimism is straining beneath a load almost, almost too great to bear. This evening Jonathan was valiantly smiling, arm in arm with his South African wife, Lydia, and soon afterward Dan London’s sister and parents were on the doorstep apologizing for their lateness and bearing extra honey cakes that they’d popped home to collect. There was a short lull in arrivals before Aunt Judith and Uncle Raymond appeared, each holding a caterers’ disposable foil tray heaped with mini Danish pastries and rugelach, Aunt Judith almost entirely hidden beneath an enormous beribboned hat. Uncle Raymond, ginger beard trimmed and marshaled for the occasion, wore the pained expression of a man who has driven half an hour from Stanmore with a car full of food that his wife hadn’t allowed him to touch so they might “break the fast with family.” It was a brave woman who would come between a fasting Uncle Raymond and a tray of rugelach, but Aunt Judith was equal to the task. They reported seeing Elaine and Roger Press and their daughter, Louisa, parking outside, although Gideon and his boyfriend, Simon, were not there as apparently they’d gone to Simon’s family in Scotland and apparently Elaine was furious. Did they know—Aunt Judith leaned closer, whispering loudly beneath her hat—did they know that Louisa Press was going out with Dan Kirsch? Dan was a cardiologist now and Louisa was finishing medical school and it was a very nice match, although Uncle Raymond had had an eye on Louisa for his nephew Johnny. Hadn’t Dan Kirsch been the little boy who had followed Rachel around everywhere on tennis camp? Adam accepted the foil tray from his uncle. “Nu? Open them, open them, this one is starving me to death,” Uncle Raymond told him, fondly patting his wife’s large bottom with one hand and his own large stomach with the other, an impressive feat of coordination. “I must eat something or I will disappear.”
The flat felt full, and cozily chaotic. The Wilsons were all on their way. Lawrence and Jaffa would be last as they had driven to Islington to collect Ziva and Ellie. It might take a while to get Ziva in the car, Lawrence had said, and Rachel and Adam were to start without them. Adam felt as if he were watching the scene from behind glass, and his own participation seemed most alien of all. There he was, greeting Elaine Press and asking after Gideon; carrying a plate to Leslie Pearl and recommending the meringues; embracing and being embraced, shaking his head sorrowfully at yet another whisper of commiseration about the sad fate of the GGP pension fund. And all the while he was thinking that Ellie was on her way to him, that a second would be all it took to whisper a time and place that they could be alone together. It was extraordinary that such dissonance could exist between inside and outside; he felt almost crazed by it.
“We made it, poppet,” he heard Lawrence say behind him and he turned, his heart thudding. Ziva was between Lawrence and Jaffa, leaning on both with an expression of fierce determination. And beside them, Ellie and Rachel were hugging. Adam, moving toward them, stopped.
To reach her cousin, Ellie was bending over as if to a child, her narrow back a long arc, her eyes cast down. Though Adam stared at her she did not lift her gaze. “You look absolutely beautiful,” he heard her say to Rachel but could not hear the soft reply. Rachel did look lovely that night—he’d noticed it himself earlier, her cheeks flushed from the warm kitchen and her eyes bright with the anticipated pleasure of generosity, of bringing everyone she loved into her own home. She looked, he thought, like a woman who had everything. She would have enough, even without him. Ellie—with Ellie there was no promise that she would ever be fine, he knew, and it would be foolish to pretend otherwise. But he would give everything he had to make it so. She needed him—anyone could see it. And Rachel didn’t. Not really.
Next to Rachel, curved and tiny and shining with health, Ellie seemed gaunt, like a spindly creature of an entirely different race. She had come in glasses that he had not known she needed, square tortoiseshell frames that emphasized the sharp angles of her face, and she wore an old sweater that he’d seen before, a huge woolen sack in funereal charcoal and black that hung off her frame in folds. If he picked her up in his arms she might fold perfectly in three, like a collapsible walking stick. And yet despite the glasses, the utter lack of adornment, she was spectacular. Her very carelessness was compelling.
Behind him he heard Jasper whispering over his shoulder, “It shouldn’t be allowed to be that hot. She’s a hot mess,” and Adam gave no answer, flinching as if a fly had buzzed past his ear. He stood rooted to the ground, staring recklessly and fixedly at her face so that she would have no choice but to acknowledge him.
Jaffa surged toward him and took his face between her hands, squeezing hard. “Ah, everything is beautiful. We will not stay long because my mother, you know, she will be very tired. But she is in good shape, no? And Ellie, she must travel very early, so just a shana tova to you both and we will have to go.”
“Shana tova, Jaffa,” he murmured. But it would not be a good year for her, he thought, and it would be his fault.
“Shana tova, bubele. She did a beautiful job with the party my girl, no? What a hostess.” Jaffa gestured around the room with a balletic sweep of her arm, a thick tube of plastic bangles clicking as she did. Her hair was a particularly bright shade of aubergine, freshly hennaed in honor of the High Holidays. “What a hostess,” she said again. Adam nodded. He wanted her away from him, this plump, smiling aggravation of his guilt.
“She gets it from you, Jaffa,” he told her, hating himself. He cast about over her head for something to draw him away.
“Yes, this I know. The cooking I gave her, and the shortness also, and the bust. But the beauty”—Jaffa looked across at Rachel who was offering a tray of mini bagels to the Wilsons—“the beauty she did not get from me. That is all her own. And the goodness, that is my husband.” She turned back to Adam and looked up at him intently. “It will be a good year for you both, I know,” she told him. It sounded like a command.
Across the room Ellie was sitting on the side of her grandmother’s deep armchair, leaning toward her so that they were touching, shoulder to shoulder. Ziva reached up and gripped her granddaughter’s hand, her head sinking toward her chest as if its weight was too much for her. Intermittently she would speak and Ellie would lower her own head, her ear close to her grandmother’s lips, never letting go of her hand. A group stood around them chatting idly, clinking teacups on saucers or forks on Rachel’s treasured lace-patterned side plates, but Ellie’s attention was only on Ziva. Occasionally she glanced up at someone to answer a question and then looked down again.
The throng that had formed was entirely composed of women who had never, to the best of Adam’s knowledge, spoken more than two nervous words to Ellie before now. Emboldened on her last night among them and no longer able to hide their fascination, they had all flocked to her side. Elaine Press and Leonora Wilson, Linda Pearl and Tanya Cohen, all asking enviously about life in Manhattan, about her apartment and her friends and the castings she went to—questions that they would never have dared to ask her until this, their final opportunity. Later, among themselves, they would discuss Ellie Schneider’s hair, her clothes, her manner; later they would remember and misremember things she’d said. They had enjoyed watching her and her return to America was depriving them of glamour, and of someone about whom they could be comfortably scandalized. Little did they know that her return was likely to prompt yet more scandal, though they would not be able to observe it at close range.
Adam leaned in the doorway and watched. He no longer imagined that he could be alone with her before she left—it was clear that she would not leave Ziva and even if she did, the others were unlikely to leave her. But still, she could not avoid his eye forever. All he needed was a single second to tell her that soon he would be following her.
She might not even know that she needed rescuing but still, he would rescue her. They would rescue each other. “If I was lucky enough to move to New York,” Adam heard Tanya say to Ellie with possibly the first words they’d ever exchanged, “I’d never, ever come back here.”
Ellie did not respond but instead whispered to Ziva who laughed, softly. Tanya, who had evidently been about to say something further, fell silent. Elaine Press took the opportunity to tell Ellie about her own recent visit to New York with Gideon and Simon, where she and the boys had gone to a service at the gay and lesbian synagogue in the West Village and someone had thought she was only fifty. Can you imagine! Lawrence, standing beside his niece, was nodding politely at Elaine’s gesture-heavy anecdote and holding a plate of his daughter’s spiced honey cake, untouched. What happened next was unimaginable.
Adam knew Lawrence. For fifteen years he had watched him intently at dinners, at football matches, in meetings and on holidays, in celebration and in crisis. He had studied him to learn and he had studied him to emulate. He understood him. And at that moment Lawrence looked at Adam and the world realigned. In his eyes, Adam saw that Lawrence knew.
He could not say how he’d arrived in the bedroom. Yet somehow he was there, battling to open the window and choking down sharp, cold breaths of air. Coats were piled high on Rachel’s crisp, ironed sheets and on the bedside tables were two vases of blushing Stargazer lilies, with which Rachel had replaced their usual clutter of books and mugs, jars of moisturizer and hair clips. Her fluffy purple dressing gown, usually on a hook in the corner, had been hidden away in the closet; her fluffy purple slippers had been paired up, invisible under the bed. The room was faultlessly tidy and he felt certain that if anyone were to mistake a cupboard door for the bathroom they would find order within as well as without. His wife would have thought of everything.
The Innocents Page 26
