The Laws of Gravity (32 page)

Abigail held her tongue—she was learning this, too, from the rabbi. “You never regret the things you don’t say,” he had once told her. “We Jews are people of the mouth. And that’s what gets us into ninety-nine percent of our trouble. Saying what’s on our minds.”

“You know I love you,” Sarah said now, as if to prove the rabbi’s point about the virtue of holding one’s tongue. “I’ll gladly dance at your wedding.—Which reminds me, isn’t Tomas coming by to get the last of his things?”

“Next week, he says. He’s moving out to New Mexico. Which is fine with me.—How’s Uncle Arthur?” Abigail said, deftly changing the subject.

“Better,” her mother said. “Much better. It’s a miracle, really. The doctors are flabbergasted. He should be dead now.”

“Well, don’t tell him that,” Abigail said. “He might die just to please the doctors.”

Abigail didn’t believe she would feel anything, one way or the other, when she saw Tomas again, and for the last time. Teddy told her otherwise. “It’s going to hit you like a load of bricks,” he told her. “I just want you to be prepared.”

“It’s different for me,” Abigail told him. They were grabbing a quick lunch—he had a class to teach that afternoon, on Jewish kabbalah. That’s
all people wanted to hear about these days, he said. Ever since Madonna and the other movie stars started studying kabbalah.

“How is it different for you?” he asked her now. He was busy salting his eggs. He salted everything too much. Abigail wished she could cook for him. Keep him healthy and safe.

“Well, for one thing,” she said, “we were never married. He was just a boyfriend.”

“A boyfriend you lived with for almost four years.”

Abigail forgot that she had told him that. She should have known better; the rabbi never forgot anything. “Still, it’s not a surprise for me, the way it was for you. I saw this coming a long time ago. I don’t know that Tomas and I were ever suited to each other, really. It’s just not that big a deal.”

“You wait and see,” Teddy warned her. “Like a ton of bricks. Just call me when it happens. Will you promise me that?”

Laughing, she promised.

Only as it turned out it wasn’t so funny after all. She did not anticipate the jolt she felt at the sight of Tomas standing among her things. He had helped pick out the dining room set; he had built the bookcase. It all came back in a rush. Tomas had already begun the move to New Mexico. He came to the apartment looking happy and fit. He’d even brought a little doll for Iris, with black hair and red smiling lips. He was wearing black pants and a white shirt, his olive skin beautiful above the open collar of his shirt. He talked about a new business venture with a female partner, and Abigail knew what that meant. His obvious happiness hurt her feelings. He kissed her good-bye, chastely, the way Teddy did. It took him two trips to the car to clear out everything he had left behind. And then, within fifteen minutes, he was gone forever and she was no longer anyone’s anything.

She had left Iris to stay with the nanny, of course, pretty blonde Lauren. Lauren was athletic, kindly, tall, young, and surprisingly cynical about relationships. Abigail sent her home early that day. “I’ll pay you, of course,” Abigail said. “I just need to be alone with Iris.”

“I understand,” Lauren said, rising quickly to go. Her own parents had had a vicious divorce—it turned out her father had been cheating on her mother for years. She scurried out the door, head down, as if fleeing her own memories, but gave Abigail a rare hug before she went.

Iris provided a cushion against the blow of that day. They took out her new toy, a gift from Teddy: magnetized letters that clung to the white refrigerator. Each letter fit inside a white holder; the machine would sing them one by one: “A! A says A! Every letter makes a sound and A makes A!”

“Or sometimes aaa, like ‘cat,’” Abigail would explain. She did this for all the vowels, not to mention C, G, K, and Y. The tune was always the same, and by the time they’d gone through all twenty-six letters three times she thought she would lose her mind.

They switched to stacking colored plastic cups of varying sizes—Iris’s old standby, which could be stacked upside down, used as building blocks, knocked over, and used to play mini-basketball with rolled-up pieces of paper. At the end of the day, the same plastic cups floated in the bath and became water toys. Iris carefully filled them with water, sometimes drank from them, and used them as boats. This favorite of all toys had cost perhaps ninety-nine cents at the local drugstore. Abigail realized that the whole toy business was a hoax. What babies really liked to play with was wrapping paper, empty boxes, tags on clothing, and paper towels.

But after bathtime came bedtime, and then Abigail felt the weight of being alone hit her full force.

She was grateful when the phone rang at eight thirty and it was Teddy’s voice on the other line, deep, masculine, with its own thrilling oddity and reverberations. A Jewish voice, a little nasal. Accenting words oddly, on unexpected syllables. Often his voice seemed on the verge of laughter, or of making a joke at his own expense. Often it was.

“So,” he said. “How’d it go?”

She sank into a kitchen chair. “Awful,” she said. “I feel like a hopeless old maid. You were absolutely right.”

“That’s why I get the big bucks,” he said. “But I would rather have been wrong. And you are
not
an old maid.” He changed the subject then, telling her about renovations scheduled for the synagogue that summer, asking her advice on architectural details. He had already arranged for her to be hired as a design consultant on the project. “I ask enough questions, at least you should be compensated for your time,” he said. A new rug was being laid—what color should it be? he wondered. Someone had offered to make tapestry covers. Others had promised to donate paintings. They were putting in new pew cushions, should they match the carpet, or contrast? Abigail agreed to look at samples.

“I hate shopping,” he said. “I can barely pick out my own shirts.” Invariably he wore the same white button-downs, but Abigail didn’t mention this.

“Look,” he said in the middle of discussing the color of curtain swags. “What is it you like best in the world?”

“Iris,” she answered promptly.
And
, she was thinking,
then you
.

“I mean activities,” he said. “We’re going to find something to cheer you up. Something to look forward to. Skiing, tennis, shopping, what?”

“Oh Lord,” she said. “None of those. Music, I guess. Classical music or ballet.”

“Thank G-d,” he said. “Because I am extremely unathletic, and I hate shopping.”

She was not surprised. He looked like the kind of big, lumbering guy who would have been handed the basketball—and dropped it.

“So how about we do this,” he suggested. “I have a three-day conference in the Berkshires in July. How about you come with me and we go to Tanglewood and—there’s some kind of a dance thing, too, nearby.”

“Jacob’s Pillow,” she said.

“See!” he said. “Jacob’s Pillow, amazing. One of my favorite Tenakah stories.” This date sounded more serious than going to look at Judaic art at a synagogue in Hicksville. It was even more serious than his showing up at her father’s retirement party.

Iris came along wherever they went, like a tiny chaperone: to the fish hatchery in Cold Spring Harbor, to Lollipop Farm, where on a chilly afternoon Iris stretched out her hand to patient sheep and baby goats. After that Teddy took them to Hamburger Chew-Chew, a kosher restaurant where vegetarian burgers were delivered on the back of toy trains that ran along a toy train track.

“Can you get off from work?” he asked now. “Do you think your parents would look after Iris?”

“Yes,” she said. “Though I’ll have to get back to you.” Her heart was pounding in her throat. She had not been expecting anything like this quite so soon. Maybe it was too soon?

“I’ll book your room for you,” he said. “Do you have any special preferences? I’m such a big lunk I always need a king-size bed.” The pounding got worse; she could hardly speak around it.

“You don’t need to book a special room for me,” she said.

“Of course I do,” he interrupted. “You’re my guest. I’m inviting you. In fact, I insist.”

Had she been in her twenties, when she was reckless, almost sleepwalking through her life, she would simply have said, “We can sleep together. What’s the big deal?” But she was in her thirties now. Now she looked and looked again before she leaped. The last thing she wanted to do was to offend this man—this
rabbi
, she reminded herself.

“No preferences,” she said meekly.

“Okay, then,” he said. “I’ll ask them for the room with the best view.”

She could have said something to
that
, too, but didn’t.

Sol had been so young when he had first started working, packing groceries after school at age twelve—and then he just kept on working through all the years of steady schooling, into college, and then law school—he hadn’t had this much free time since he was about six or seven years old and summer vacation opened out like an infinite vista.

Now he could pick and choose among many invitations. He agreed to a lecture tour to Asia in October; Sarah would be bat-mitzvahed by then. They would travel for three weeks, to the Philippines, to Malaysia, Singapore, and then to Thailand, home of Iris’s birth. Sarah was eager to see it again and to bring back gifts and souvenirs to her little granddaughter.

He had begun tentative negotiations with one arbitration association he liked over in Glen Head. Consulting. He would have flexibility, they assured him, and the work need not begin till after his trip. He might or might not take them up on the offer. His last case had left a scar. He still occasionally dreamed about it, the usual courtroom dreams—he had come to the courtroom unprepared, had lost all his notes, and Flannery was nowhere to be found. Instead Sarah was his clerk and she chastised him for leaving his office messy. Or he came into his chambers only to discover a funeral for Nicole Greene already under way, with that new young rabbi, Teddy Lewin, leading the service and staring at him with burning eyes.

Thanks to Joe Iccarino’s help, Sol started an herb garden. Nothing too fancy to begin with. He and Sarah spent two evenings a week sitting with Iris, and the other evenings were busy preparing for the lectures in October. Perhaps this was why, when he received the first letter from Brooklyn Federal Detention Center, from Naveen Abou, he did not respond with his usual speed. It was largely a note of sympathy. She had read about the case in the newspapers, she said, and her heart went out to him and to both the families. She would keep them all in her prayers. Her handwriting was fluid and ornate, in blue ink on coarse prison paper. He could hear her voice, even her lisp, behind the written words. She added in a postscript that she hoped he might find time to visit her soon, as she had news of her own to share.

Sol kept meaning to go, but then Arthur had his stroke, and somehow between lecture notes and his granddaughter and everything else—he had taken to playing chess with Arthur once a week, for instance, and was amazed to find his brother a formidable opponent—week after week slipped by.

Then came a second note from Naveen that read simply, “Come as soon as you can, please,” and he was off to Brooklyn Federal the next day. It was the start of the Memorial Day weekend, and the traffic, as he feared, was horrendous. “Can’t you go next week?” Sarah asked, but he waved the note at her, and she nodded.

“Bring a book,” she advised.

“I always bring Naveen a book.” This time it was Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s
Gift from the Sea
.

“I meant a book for you,” she said. “Trust me, you’ll need it.”

She was absolutely right, of course. It took him nearly an hour just to get
on
the expressway, and then he was more or less parked for the next two hours, inching forward—just often enough so that he could not, in fact, read the biography of Truman he’d brought along. Lucky he had a strong bladder, he thought. A horse and buggy could have made the trip in less time. He spent another hour negotiating the small highways and tortuous back streets that led to Brooklyn Federal. But he was lucky. Summer had come early, most cars had their windows rolled up tight and their air conditioning on, but a few poor souls sat panting like dogs with all their windows rolled down for a hint of a breeze, and others, unluckier still, had overheated and sat by the side of the road with smoke rising from the hoods of their stalled cars.