The Innocents (24 page)

He stood up and stretched before walking back to his own seat. “You don’t have to start worrying about what I eat just yet,” he said, moving aside the seat belt to sit down. “We’ve only been married ten days.”

The honeymoon was over. They had another full day together in New York but the tranquil Maui spell had evaporated the moment they joined a queue of a hundred angry, time-pressed New Yorkers waiting for cabs in jungle-thick humidity. The city was smoggy and boiling and a warm rain fell intermittently but did not break the heaviness of the air. Rachel’s energies were devoted to doing battle with her hair in the humidity and to buying a series of items, both for herself and on commissions for other people, from a list so long and so randomly assorted that it felt as if they were on a particularly tedious scavenger hunt. Adam did not see that they needed to chase around a sweltering SoHo looking for organic sun cream for his mother, nor could he imagine that Michelle had really insisted they find it. But Rachel was tremendously excited to be in New York and a great part of that excitement, he could see, came from the opportunity it offered for beneficence. She could bring back coveted moisturizers and eye creams and lip balms and tank tops and CDs and cupcakes and iPad accessories for the poor people back home, the underprivileged who did not have the chance to shop the Big Apple as she did. Bringing gifts for others made Rachel feel cosmopolitan and she approached the task with gravity and a minute attention to detail, as if she were scouring the rain forest for rare, healing berries. Along the way she would say things like “I’m sure they stock Kate Somerville products at Henri Bendel,” and all Adam could extract from these explanations was that strange people, Kate Someone and Henry Something, were making him spend the last days of his holiday loitering in department store cosmetics halls. He had suggested that they briefly separate so that he could at least retreat into the air-conditioned paradise of MoMA for an hour or two—when they’d booked the tickets he’d had a vision of himself in New York, standing in contemplation before Jasper Johns’s American flag; coming face to face with Warhol’s Marilyn screen prints and understanding for the first time the subversive brilliance that a postcard, a T-shirt, a mouse mat reproduction could never convey. He’d even have been happy to sit round the corner and have a cold beer while she shopped—but Rachel had looked wounded. “We’re on our honeymoon, Ads!” she’d exclaimed. To leave her side for a moment would not, it was clear, be correct honeymoon protocol.

But finally, on the penultimate day, they were following Adam’s wishes and meeting an old friend for brunch. Zach Sabah was the son of one of Rupert Sabah’s first cousins and had been at the same prep school as Adam, Dan London and Gideon Press, after which Zach was promptly whisked off to Eton. Then, because his mother was American, he had disappeared to Princeton and had never returned. He turned up in London every now and again but hadn’t visited for over four years—precisely the length of his employment at a New York hedge fund. His parents had retired to Israel, where his mother had instantly been moved to come out of retirement and had opened a nursery school. Lisa London would be jealous they were seeing him, Rachel confided happily, because she’d always fancied Zach, and these days he was almost never in NW11.

“Ten days holiday a year,” he explained, sitting on the pavement outside Cafe Cluny in the West Village. The benches were all full; even with a reservation they’d been told that it would be another half an hour for a brunch table. Impatient New Yorkers would be patient only if there were eggs Benedict on the horizon.

Rachel was sitting on her bag to avoid getting marks on a new cream dress and was biting the straw of the iced coffee that she would press, intermittently, against her cheek to cool herself down.

“That’s awful!” she exclaimed. “Daddy and Tony give everyone at GGP twenty days, don’t they?”

“Christ, I should move back to London. Sorry, Ezra should be here any second and then they’ll seat us. We need
‘all of our party’
before they’ll give us the table. I wanted you to meet him though, I think you’d get on. He used to be a lawyer too but he jacked it in a couple of years ago and you’ve never seen a happier man.”

Adam thought Zach himself looked pretty contented. He had made no attempt to assimilate and seemed actually to have become more English during his tenure in New York—he was wearing a pink and white striped shirt, the neck open, the collar turned up, and had grown a foppish shag of hair that fell into his eyes. The boys on their football team would never have permitted this in London and would have ridiculed him until he had a haircut and turned his collar back where it belonged, but Adam imagined that the English-dandy look probably went down quite well with New Yorkers. In any case, as a Sabah, he was more qualified than the others. Adam noticed that his signet ring, never aired in North West London unless he was going to see his grandfather, was back on the little finger of his left hand.

“Anyway it’s good here, I swear, I wouldn’t keep you waiting otherwise. Great eggs.”

“Brioche French toast with berries for me!” said Rachel happily. She had studied the framed menu in the window when they first arrived and, Adam noticed, was embracing carbohydrates as long-lost friends.

“Ezra. Ezra!” Zach stood from the pavement and gestured to a very tall man who was ambling toward them across the cobblestones, a white keffiyeh round his neck and shoulder-length dark hair held back in a plastic Alice band. He was holding a scroll of newspapers and had a very large Polaroid camera hung round his neck. Adam stood to shake his hand; Rachel stayed perched on her bag and waved shyly.

Ezra lifted the camera from round his neck and handed it to Zach. “I just found this in a consignment store on the way. Isn’t it amazing? The mirror’s jammed but I think I can fix it.” He turned to Adam and Rachel. “So
mazel tov
, you guys. Zach says you’re on your honeymoon.”

Adam nodded. Rachel glowed.

A girl in an extremely low-cut black top leaned out of the door of the restaurant and called into the small crowd, “Zachpartyoffour?” She led them in, gesturing with a clipboard, and they were settled at a table in the window under the envious eyes of the crowd still waiting and sweltering outside.

“So how’s the play?” Zach asked Ezra, and then explained, “He’s written a really cool play in collaboration with a scientist at Harvard about the synthetic genome, and it’s been on in Brooklyn for the last month or so.”

“They’ve just extended the run actually.”

“A play about science?” Rachel asked, dubiously.

“It’s genius,” Zach reassured her, taking a monogrammed handkerchief out of his pocket and polishing his sunglasses. The handkerchief, Adam thought, was going a bit far.

“What’s it about?” asked Adam.

“It’s about that guy, Craig Venter, he’s a sort of an entrepreneurial geneticist, and his lab created a synthetic genome, the first synthetic life—”

“I remember that, it was terrible!” Rachel interposed.

Adam noticed Ezra’s eyebrow twitch.

“What inspired you?” Adam asked him, quickly.

“It just consumed me when I read about it.” Ezra turned away from Rachel to Adam. “I got obsessed, and I started emailing this biologist guy I knew at Harvard to learn a bit more about it. It was the most beautiful feat of bioengineering, and it’s created a taxonomic shift in everything—the way we see life. It changes the very definition of it. On a practical level, what Venter achieved has brought us closer to a time when we’ll be able to create bacteria that make biofuels, or clear carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, or are, like, miniature factories for specific vaccines. On a far more crucial level though, and what I was interested in, he’s pushed the boundaries. He’s changed the definition of what it is to be alive. What life means. He’s shown what can be achieved if scientists—if people—are open-minded and think outside the prescribed boundaries of what conventional morality, or religious doctrine, might say is acceptable. He’s actually playing God.”

“That’s awful!” Rachel said again. “He should stop!”

Adam resisted the urge to clamp his hand over her mouth but Ezra merely shrugged. He slid off the Alice band, shook his hair out, and then replaced the band higher up. It was an oddly masculine version of a familiar female gesture.

“Why? I believe in intellectual freedom. He has a right to ideas independent of the dictates of a particular community. I think I’d take the right to think freely and pursue new ideas over almost all else. Venter agrees, and the outraged collective will come to see in the future that he was right.”

Adam looked expectantly at Rachel. This hypothetical place that Ezra was describing to her—a place free from communal values and where there was no collective judgment to fear—was as foreign to her as the moon. North West London was a place of open minds when it came to science—and politics and literature and sexuality and art—but Rachel did not usually trouble herself with such thoughts one way or the other. When it came to making life choices, other people’s expectations were of paramount importance to her. They made her feel safe, because she always knew what to think. Her world was one in which her own highest aspirations had always been those wanted for her by a community, and the concept of innovation at a cost of isolation (or even mild disapproval) wasn’t worth it. There was security in their social dictates. She was also unused to having men disagree with her. He watched her reaction with interest but she merely pouted slightly and poured syrup on her French toast.

After a moment Ezra said to Adam, “You should come, I’d like to know what you think.”

“We’d love to,” he said. Rachel was still busily cutting a slice of French toast, and he could not catch her eye.

“Great, hit me up tomorrow and I’ll leave tickets on the door for you.”

Adam exchanged looks with Zach, who was smiling at him with an expression that said, “I told you you’d like him.” There was no corresponding look of appreciation for Rachel.

On the way back to the hotel they stopped to pick up frozen yoghurt at a do-it-yourself ice cream shop that Rachel had read about in their guidebook. A row of nozzles offered fat-free confections in flavors from lychee to cupcake batter; Rachel got particular pleasure from anything fatless, though to Adam these tasted like air and artificial sweeteners. As they were walking back along Bleecker Street, Adam humming the Paul Simon song and peering into the windows of the cheese shops and fishmongers and Italian delis, Rachel said, “I couldn’t think of a single excuse to give that man about his awful play.”

“Why? I thought we were going. It sounded interesting. It’s actually a kind of brilliant idea for a play if it works.”

Rachel laughed, stroking her spoon over the crest of her yoghurt to collect the chocolate chips sprinkled on top. “Seriously, Ads, it sounded like the most boring thing
ever
! We can’t go all the way to Brooklyn tomorrow to see a play about a crazy man who grows bacteria. If we were planning on going to a show here it should have been something real, like a Broadway musical or something.”

“Brooklyn’s not that far; they both came up from Brooklyn to meet us for brunch today,” Adam pointed out. He was irritated with her. He had been determined to go to the play and yet he’d known, even as he’d been setting his heart on it, that Rachel would refuse. He had enjoyed talking to Ezra. Adam wanted to see him again and imagined the play would be intelligent. And even if it wasn’t, he thought with annoyance, it was something different to do. It was something they would never do in London. Rachel smiled at him with her spoon in her mouth, raising her eyebrows and holding out her tub of yoghurt to him.

“It was self-serve,” he said crossly. “If I’d wanted vanilla, I’d have got it myself.”

“Ads”—Rachel pouted at him—“don’t get your knickers in a twist. We met your friends today and that’s already quite a lot of other people to spend time with on our honeymoon.”

She stood on tiptoe and kissed his cheek, ruffling his hair as if he could be jollied out of a sulk. He smiled back, feeling weary. This was how it would be, he realized, and giving in was easier than trying to explain. When Rachel didn’t want something there was no sensible discussion to be had, because she couldn’t even see that other people might feel differently. He threw the rest of his frozen yoghurt into a bin.

“Ads, I wanted to try the peanut butter flavor!” Rachel protested.

“Then you should have got it yourself, shouldn’t you,” he said, as jovially as he could, but he meant it.

20

The first time Dan London had brought Willa to the Gilberts’ for Shabbat, Willa had expressed her interest in converting to Judaism and Lawrence had advised her, “There’s really not much to it. Any Jewish holiday can be described the same way. They tried to kill us. They failed. Let’s eat.” On Purim it was Haman, an evil Iago in a three-cornered hat, who had attempted the killing, and whose failure is marked by the eating of three-cornered pastries. Along with these
hamantaschen
, sweet dough glossed with egg and filled with poppy seeds, the day is marked with a great deal of drinking, attending synagogue in fancy dress, and a theatrical reading of the Book of Esther in which, whenever the name Haman is mentioned, the congregation boos and heckles like a football crowd to drown it out. It is the one day of the Jewish calendar in which cross-dressing is not only permissible but actually encouraged. The closest equivalent is a Christmas pantomime.