The Innocents (28 page)

“I can’t be there either.”

He briefly considered a joke here, something about other angry wives, and then reconsidered. Instead he raised an eyebrow, inviting her to go on.

“It’s just easier for me to be here.” She looked at him and paused. “For many reasons. Don’t you think?”

The waiter had returned and Adam sat back, moving his arms from the table.

“No. I don’t. I think you should be in London. There are people in London thinking about you. Missing you.”

“In which case,
merci
,” she added, accepting a glass of creamy hot chocolate. On top quivered a drift of whipped cream the size of a tennis ball beneath a mound of shaved chocolate curls. “In which case, why didn’t you come over and talk to me when I was, in fact, in London? In the pub?”

“Oh, Ziva told you I looked for you? I couldn’t find you anywhere…”

She paused with a spoonful of whipped cream halfway to her mouth. “That’s horseshit. I was standing at the bar, I saw you. I knew you were there.”

Adam felt himself redden. “Well, if you saw me there…” He trailed off.

“Because you had come looking for me, remember? And if you wanted to stand there in the doorway, if you wanted to stay away from me you must have had your reasons. And I was going to come after you when you left but I figured it would be selfish. You decided something else was more important, I guess. You were fighting with something, I could see it. I didn’t want to stand in the way of that.”

“I was fighting with something.”

“Me, too. And we both won.” She smiled again, but without warmth. “Right? We both won. Everything’s as it should be.”

“But it’s not. Nothing’s as it should be.” Adam pushed aside his own glass and reached for her across the table but she reared back, spoon in hand and held aloft as if to defend herself.

“What the hell are you doing?”

“Sorry, sorry,” he mumbled. He pulled his saucer back toward him and, for lack of anything better to do with his hands, clasped them around the hot glass.

Ellie sat forward again and said, softly, “I’m sorry. I am—I didn’t mean to talk to you like that. But, Adam, everything’s different. You’re married now. To my cousin. You married Rachel. You chose.”

He ignored what he felt to be the unfairness of that comment. “I know. But just tell me—”

“Let’s not talk about it now. Is that okay? I’ve only got another hour. Can I have you till then? Can we just have a little time not talking about how fucked up everything is? I promise—I’m not avoiding anything. I’m not pretending anything. I am well aware that you’re Rachel’s. But I just want to”—she dropped her spoon on the saucer with a clatter and circled her hands, searching for words—“I just want to enjoy having you here for a while. Before either of us says anything out loud that means it’s not okay for us to sit here together. Okay?”

He nodded. The rush of humiliation that he’d felt when she’d pulled away from him was subsiding.

“Okay.”

“Good. So let’s talk about other things.”

“Okay.” he said. “You go first.”

23

They had left the station café and now stood outside so that Ellie could smoke. After the first cigarette she had moved on to a joint, covered as always in coconuts. Adam was holding Rocky’s lead and trying not to worry about being arrested, but he could not help wondering what the precise implications would be for a lawyer caught with someone smoking pot in the middle of a Paris street. It had taken all his self-control not to tell her to put it away but he was loath to waste a second of the time they had together, and he wanted her to learn to trust him so that she would allow him to guide her when it was important. He wanted to be a protective influence in her life. He would not give her an excuse to push him away by fussing like a Jewish mother. Let her be as she was. Instead he breathed in the sweet smell so evocative of Ellie, and tried to focus on what she was saying.

“It’s inane if you make it inane. Or it can be creative and inspiring and collaborative.”

“Don’t you get bored?” he asked.

“I’m not going to say that only boring people get bored because I hate when people say that, it’s such a boring thing to say. But I guess it’s what you make of it.” Adam was leaning on an empty bike rack watching Ellie as she paced before him on the pavement. Rocky sat between his feet. “You can sit like a vegetable sending text messages while you’re in hair and makeup for three hours, or you can see it as time you’re being paid to sit in a chair and educate yourself. I’d read all of Dickens—including the nonfiction that most people never bother with—by the time I was twenty-two, and I was paid to do it. There’s no way I’d ever have plowed through
Our Mutual Friend
if it hadn’t been for Chanel, but then I was in Rome for them a few years before that and they also gave me
Martin Chuzzlewit
and I mean, what a fucking page-turner! And now it’s all there marinating and I hope—God, I hope—it will make me a better writer one day. At the moment, Balmain is paying me to read Tolstoy. I’m up to 1889 and
The Kreutzer Sonata
.”

“So you still want to write,” he said, carefully. Jaffa had talked a lot about Ellie “throwing away her opportunities to make a smutty film”—he had heard it so many times that he had, he realized, assumed it was true.

She laughed. A wind picked up, blowing her hair across her face. She turned up the collar of her leather jacket. “What, you mean do I still want to be a novelist even though Columbia University decided I was just a little bit too creative to get a master’s in creative writing? Yes. I know it’s crazy but I guess I just figured that some people have struggled by and managed to write fiction without a degree in it.”

“Point taken. But why did you want to do the course in the first place then, if it’s pointless?”

“It’s not pointless. It’s just not necessary. It was a time killer. I love learning, I love writing, and I didn’t want to do a master’s in literature that would have sucked all the joy for me out of any writer I chose for my thesis. And so it was a little counterweight to the modeling which always makes people assume you’re stupid. It was enriching my fabric, or whatever. Life experience.”

It was Adam’s turn to laugh. “I’d say your fabric was pretty enriched already.”

She smiled back. “Maybe. But who wants to hear the ramblings of a twenty-four-year-old? Give me a decade more and I’ll give it a shot. Maybe two. In the meantime I’m preparing.”

“So what do you mean ‘up to’ 1899 and
The Kreutzer Sonata?
Do you always read chronologically?”

She nodded. “Eighteen-eighty-nine. Always. I’ve always done it. I like to evolve with the author. I don’t want to know their futures before they do and if I’m really reading a writer, like, committed to reading their whole oeuvre, then I want to move through their life with them and their work. If I love someone I want to walk beside them from the first to the last.”

A silence fell between them. Adam began to stroke Rocky’s fragile belly, gently, with his toe. The dog rolled onto his back, tiny legs splayed in undignified bliss.

“My little comrade,” Ellie said, fondly. “You’ve won him over.”

“How old is he?”

“Five. I got him when I was on a job in L.A. They have this pet shop in the Beverly Center where they’ll let you play with the dogs—there was no way I was going to get a puppy and if I did then I wanted an Airedale, and a rescue, but then I met Rocky and it was done.” She looked down appraisingly at the small animal as if reminding herself of his attributes, cataloging the charms with which he had conquered her. “He’s been all over. He was in a shoot with me, once. For some cheap sunglasses commercial thing.”

“We had an Airedale when I was younger,” Adam told her. “Called Norman Levene.”

Ellie threw her head back with sudden laughter.

“I never actually knew why his surname was different from ours. I suspect my sister had something to do with it.”

“Your sister’s so cool. She told me to read
The Line of Beauty
when I met her and it was honestly life-changing. I’d never even heard of him and there he was—my favorite writer just waiting to be found. It was like the perfect
shidduch
.”

Adam was surprised that Ellie had ever spoken to his sister, even more so that she had endorsed her, improbably, as cool.

“I wouldn’t talk to Olivia about
shidduchs
.”

“Yes, I had the impression there was some anxiety bubbling about her love life. I didn’t really get why it was anyone’s business.”

“Everything is everyone’s business,” said Adam and then in case he’d sounded bitter added, “but if you know an eccentric medieval historian then give him my sister’s number.”

“Not gay?”

“No. Not to the best of my knowledge. My mother asks her once a week.”

“Hmm. Well, I should find her a sexy French model then,” Ellie mused. “No need to condemn her to a man in tweed just yet.”

Adam could pursue this line of thought no further, in jest or otherwise. The idea of Olivia with a male model was beyond the flexibility of his imagination.

“Will you stay here in Paris, do you think?”

She affected a nonchalant French shrug. “
Qui sait
?”

“Don’t. Move back to London. Come back.”

“Stop saying that when you know I can’t be in London,” she said, suddenly. “It hurts.”

He looked up. Her voice had changed; she was no longer smiling. Her hands were in her pockets, and she looked cold. It had begun to rain, but she made no move to go back inside.

“Don’t you think I would? But this isn’t about me, or about what I want. Who knows, maybe people who seem like they get everything get it because they do the right thing and deserve it.”

“You don’t mean that, surely,” he asked, incredulous. “You don’t believe in karma and all that crap. What was it you said? ‘A firm belief in randomness.’”

“God, I don’t know.”

“It’s crap. Fine, you’re right in the sense that we should all work harder to be better but you can’t follow that argument through. It’s too cruel to say that bad things happen as punishment for things we’ve done, you can’t possibly believe that. It’s rubbish. Life is random.”

“Okay, maybe. But there’s nothing wrong with saying that the looking after other people, the morality—that those things will make your life better, indirectly, because then you deserve better. There is so much bourgeois bullshit in Hampstead Garden Suburb and gossip and whispering but you know what? People there have values that make you sit up straighter.”

“As long as it doesn’t leave you believing that you deserve the bad things,” Adam repeated, stubbornly.

“No one deserves bad things.”

“No.”

“But some people seem like they are worthier of the good things than others,” Ellie observed.

“Do you think?”

“I don’t know. When I was younger I used to be so jealous of Rachel that I thought it would kill me.”

Adam crouched down to stroke Rocky again, hiding his surprise.

“Her life seemed so easy and perfect, and she gets everything she wants and it felt like my life was just the opposite. Like, I was watching her get everything that I wanted. She had Lawrence, who worships her. And then she got you. I just—I wanted to be her; I wanted everything she had. And now I think, well, maybe to be her I would have had to
be
her—remembering everyone’s birthdays and who doesn’t like mushrooms and volunteering in old people’s homes and teaching Sunday school and whatever else she did. Not karmically or mystically or whatever. Just—be good, think of other people, and maybe other people think of you. So this is me, thinking of other people.”

By some unspoken agreement they had begun walking slowly back inside and through the station, and when they reached an empty bench in the concourse Ellie sat down and scooped the tiny dog onto her lap. He wanted to say—Rachel’s life isn’t perfect. She doesn’t have everything. After all, I’m here with you. Instead he said softly, “I’m sorry.”

“Me, too.” She began to pick at the graffiti paint that flaked from the bench beneath them. Then she asked, “Is she happy, at least?”

“Yes. I think she’s happy.”

“I’m glad.”

Adam snorted. He had felt so close to her seconds ago; now he felt light-years away. “How can you be so bloody stoic all the time? How can you be glad she’s happy? Are you happy? I’m not happy. I’m fucking miserable.” He looked at Ellie who had her little finger between her teeth, tearing at the skin around her nail. A bubble of blood formed and he winced; it was all he could do not to slap her hand away from her mouth to stop her hurting herself. She said nothing, and he continued, “You—you showed me just this tantalizing glimpse of how it could be and at the same time you expect me to keep everything from before exactly the same, everything I thought I wanted before I even knew that life could be any other way. I didn’t know, don’t you see that? I thought I wanted it but that was because I didn’t know there was anything else. You said I chose, but it wasn’t a real choice. She was all I knew.”

It was a shock, when he finished, to realize that Ellie was crying. Rachel cried all the time; he was virtually immune to it. But Ellie crying—he could hardly bear it.