The Innocents (22 page)

“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 baby—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.

And everyone was happy. Ziva was happy, watching a union two generations on from her own, a future that had once been unimaginable. Lawrence and Jaffa were happy, seeing the happiness of their beloved little girl—now undeniably a woman. Tanya Pearl (soon to be Cohen) was happy because Jasper had surprised nobody by proposing in July, and going to weddings is a favorite pastime among the newly engaged. Olivia was happy because the quotations she had selected for her brother’s Order of Service—a Stoppard line from
The Real Thing
on love, another on a wedding from the Song of Songs—had been much admired.