The Tenth Song (6 page)

It’s not my fault! he shouted silently to the cynical voice inside him, which sat in silent observation, unmoved and unconvinced. “Okay. Perhaps I was naïve. Perhaps I should have been more suspicious, checked things out more thoroughly. But that would have been like exchanging a beautiful gift for a credit slip when there was absolutely nothing better to buy.

“GREEDY,” the ugly, unforgiving voice shouted in his ear.

“HARDWORKING AND CLEVER!” he shouted back.

“Irresponsible and dishonest toward a client,” the voice changed tack, whispering.

This cut him to the quick: “NO, NO, HOW CAN YOU SAY THAT! I’M INNOCENT, INNOCENT.”

Only when the man next to him said: “What?” did he open his eyes, realizing that his thoughts had found voice.

5

When Abigail came home, she ran up the stairs to find her cell phone. It had twenty-five unanswered calls.

After speaking to Ida, she frantically called their lawyer, Louis, and a taxi service, not trusting herself to drive. All the way to the courthouse, only one thing went through her head: Adam Samuels was the most honest man she had ever known. If he lost luggage and collected insurance money, he actually wrote to return the money when the suitcase showed up ten months later. “They probably have to hire a person to staff a whole new department to handle your letter,” Abigail had teased him. “It’s never happened before.”

But deep down, she was proud to be married to such a man. He never cheated on his income tax. Even when he had legitimate business expenses, like dinners. If he so much as invited Abigail along, he refused to deduct it as a business expense.

These things hadn’t surprised her. From the beginning of their relationship, she had seen this in his character. It was one of the reasons she’d fallen in love with him.

They’d met as young singles at a party given by a college fraternity for observant Jews at Brooklyn College. Except they didn’t call it a party but a
lecture or—better yet—a
symposium,
all the better to deodorize such a gathering from the smell of desperation that clung to Young Israel singles weekends. No one still in college could admit they needed rabbis involved to facilitate their social lives.

So there had been a speaker talking about Soviet Jewry and how to get Anatoly Sharansky and other prisoners of Zion out of the gulag. Afterward, the discussion about the efficacy of public protests versus quiet diplomacy had become a nasty shouting match.

Elliot Reich, the boy she had come with, had loudly defended all the clandestine negotiations supposedly going on between the Kremlin and certain Hasidic rabbis which—according to Elliot—were just on the verge of achieving miraculous results that would be blown to bits by rude public demonstrations insulting to the Soviets. Others had shouted him down, mocking his theories: “Right—the rabbis sitting in Crown Heights have a hotline to the Kremlin! We need to boycott Soviet goods and demand America stop exporting wheat to them. Let them all starve until they open the prison gates for our people!”

Then the room suddenly turned ugly.

“You are just like the American Jews who sat back and did nothing when they were gassing Jews in the concentration camps!” someone shouted.

That was the moment she’d first seen Adam. He took a few steps forward, raising his fingers, his palms outstretched. The room suddenly went quiet, as if something reasonable had been said that everyone could agree with. People seemed to know him, she thought, impressed, looking around.

He spoke so softly that she had to strain to hear him. “Three men are seated on a plane: a Communist, a Fascist, and a Russian Jew. The plane begins to shake, and the three cry out to heaven to save them. An angel appears and says: ‘God has heard your prayers. He will keep the plane from going down. More than that—He was so impressed with all of you, that He’s decided to grant you each a wish!’ The Communist wishes that all Fascists would disappear from the earth. The Fascist wishes the same for all Communists. The Jew says, ‘If you are going to grant their wishes, I’ll just take a cup of coffee.’ ” Laughter broke around the room. Then he turned serious. “Maybe we can’t do much about
Soviet Jews at the moment, except jaw, but there are still plenty of other tragedies going on in the world where we can be helpful. Like the famine in Biafra.”

Suddenly, magically, the atmosphere changed. People’s faces unfroze as they lifted paper cups filled with harmless soft drinks to their lips. It turned back into the social event it was meant to be. How had he managed that so easily? she wondered, her eyes following him with admiration and curiosity as he walked around the room collecting money in an empty ice bucket. Then he was suddenly standing in front of her.

He was taller than he’d seemed from across the room, but not too tall. She hated the neck-bending required to communicate with towering males, feeling as if looking up to someone physically ensured her an inferior position in the relationship. It made her feel childish and vulnerable. With Adam, all she had to do was slightly lift her chin.

She studied his eyes, which were a calm, dark brown, very steady, behind the awful nerdy black-framed glasses of the late sixties. But somehow, because his face was so large and handsome, his jaw so square, he pulled it off Clark-Kentishly. He had thick, badly cut black hair and a girl on his arm—a sorority type, the doctor’s daughter or the daughter of people determined she’d be the doctor’s wife—wearing a twinset and wildly expensive yellow patent-leather Italian flats that were the latest status symbol among rich Jewish college girls.

Right then and there, Abigail had given up hope, almost simultaneously with the flash of recognition that she had hope. She was not competitive when it came to men and had an abiding sense of inferiority toward anyone who looked as if they’d been brought up carefully by nurturing parents with high expectations and demands—the opposite of her own.

“You’ve got to be kidding!” Elliot snorted with derision, looking into the bucket. For the first time, Abigail realized what a condescending jerk he was. But thrown off kilter by her own nervous attraction, she found herself giggling.

“He’s right, Adam,” the girl in the twinset said, rolling her eyes and giving his arm a tug.

“There is nothing funny about this,” he said quietly to Abigail, ignoring Elliot and his girlfriend. He spoke firmly in a way that made Abigail want to sink with misery into the ground.

“Come on, you have to admit, it’s a bit of an odd venue for African fund-raising,” Elliot sneered, thinking no doubt he was defending Abigail’s honor. She stepped away from him, reaching into her purse and taking out ten dollars (her campus lunch money for the week) and throwing it inside with the nickels and dimes. Her eyes met Adam’s.

“I know, you’re right. I’m… I didn’t mean… to laugh… It was just so…”

“Stupid and embarrassing?” the girl in the twinset suggested, dropping his arm and flouncing away. He looked after her, confused, but made no move to follow.

“I thought instead of fighting, we could actually accomplish some good this evening.” He shrugged. “I apologize. Here…” He placed the ten back into her palm, closing her fingers over it. ”I know you need it.”

She looked out of the car window, her fingers massaging her knuckles, remembering the first time his hands had touched hers, so warm and electric that she had pulled away. She had been appalled that he’d seen through her largesse, refusing to take the money back.

“No! Please. Keep it. I mean… give it… contribute it… I’m… It wasn’t… It was a good idea,” she finally blurted out, by this time thoroughly mortified at her sudden, uncharacteristic stutter and strange discomfort.

“I’m not even sure how to get this money to any refugees…” he said honestly.

She laughed, and this time he joined her, his face relaxing. They moved into a quiet corner, Elliot looking after her, furious.

“Your boyfriend seems upset.”

“Oh, he’s not really… my…” She swallowed. “So does your girlfriend.”

“Oh—Darlene. She’s very opinionated. Besides, I think she’s getting ready to dump me anyhow.”

“Why?” She smiled, strangely at ease.

“I think I’m not what her father had in mind.”

“Oh. And what would that be?”

“Premed or prelaw.”

“What are you then?”

“A lowly accounting major. I’ve always loved numbers. I thought once I’d go into pure math. Do a Ph.D. But I’m not smart enough. Those guys are really geniuses. What about you?”

“Oh, my mother thinks I should take education courses and become a teacher.”

“Your mother but not you?”

“Good guess.”

“And you?”

“I’ve always loved words, reading. I suppose I’m still in my adolescent fantasy of becoming a writer.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“It’s like wanting to be an actress. Very, very high failure rate, then what?”

“Editor? Journalist? Public relations, copywriter… ?”

“I suppose it would be better to fail at any of those than become a successful teacher.” She sighed.

“So, what
are
you majoring in?”

“English—and education…”

“So, you can teach English… ?”

“Right. Hedging all bets.”

“I guess we’ve got a lot in common then…”

Abigail looked into his comfortable smiling eyes and rested there, her whole body quiet with relief.

“Give me your phone number.”

She looked down at her hands, feeling almost as if he’d shaken her out of a deep sleep.

“So I can call you and tell you what I did with your money.”

“Oh, of course.” She smiled, deflated but never doubting this was a beginning.

She waited for his call, finding herself turning down dates, evening invitations with her friends, anything that would take her away from the phone when he might suppose her to be home.

A week went by, and she’d felt anxious. When two weeks passed, she felt disappointed but hopeful. But as weeks three, four, and five disappeared without
the slightest sign he had ever existed, she found herself going through a range of emotions that began with reasonable doubt (had he lost her number?) and ended with righteous indignation bordering on anger and hopelessness. He had seemed so sincere. But perhaps, like many other people, he was just a good actor who hadn’t meant a word of anything he’d said, pocketing the money and having a good laugh.

She finally took up her life again where she’d left off, agreeing to see a movie with a girlfriend. When she returned, uplifted that the spell had finally been broken, her mother said: “You had a phone call.”

Of course, it was Adam.

“What’d he say?”

“That he’d call back.”

“When—?”

“Well, well.” Her mother had looked at her curiously. “What have we here?”

She smiled, remembering what had happened next, which had set the frank and honest tone in which their entire life together had always been lived.

The phone rang again, and this time she’d run to get it.

“Hello? Abigail? It’s me. Adam.”

“Adam. It’s been so… long.”

There was a beat that gave her enough time to blush at the embarrassing neediness her words revealed.

“Oh, yes. Sorry. It’s taken me a while to find out where to send our Biafra money.”

“Oh, that.” She was both relieved at his honesty and upset that this was a business call.

“I wanted to make sure it would actually get there—so I had to check out how much overhead they take, and salaries. This organization is pretty much all volunteer, and they have been around forever…”

“It must have taken a lot of effort.”

“Well, I have this thing about money. If you take someone’s hard-earned cash, then you have a big responsibility to make sure it’s used honestly.”

“That is good of you.”

“I’d like to send you a copy of the receipt. What’s your address?”

She’d told him.

“What part of town is that?”

“Bayswater.”

“A bit of a ride from Brooklyn!”

“I know. Which is why all us girls here have been designated G.U.”

“G.U.?”

“Geographically undesirable.”

He laughed. “That was actually my next question.”

Something about what to put on the tax receipt, no doubt! she’d thought.

She put her hand on her cheek now, remembering what had happened next.

“Well, I was wondering if you’d like to go out with me Saturday night?”

“I can’t believe you’re finally asking me out!” she’d blurted out before she could stop herself.

There was a long, silent pause. “Do you always react this way when a boy asks you out?” he’d deadpanned.

“No,” she’d answered honestly. “Just you.”

The interrogation had been polite but brutal. He tried to answer the questions honestly and simply, but soon found that was impossible without incriminating himself. He soon stopped cooperating, having seen enough television shows to know he shouldn’t answer anything without a lawyer present. At a certain point, his interrogators gave up, and he was taken into court.

When the doors opened, he saw Abigail and his lawyer waiting for him. He searched her face, terrified of what he might find there. He saw fear, and anger, and heartbreak and even—surprisingly—guilt. He could deal with those things, he told himself, relieved, reaching out to touch her. She was shaking.

“Adam, it’s all over the Internet,” she told him. “Everyone knows.”

He didn’t move, paralyzed by what he imagined he’d seen in her eyes, the one thing he would not have been able to survive: doubt.

It was she who moved toward him, drawing him into her arms and resting her head on his shoulder, hugging him to her as if her life depended on it.

“I haven’t done anything…” he whispered, hugging her back desperately, like a child, like a lover.

“Shush… shush… Of course. I know that. You don’t even have to say it.”

He meshed his fingers through hers and enfolded them. “I thought we’d have more time to prepare the family. Until tomorrow at least. Do the kids know… ? Kayla… Shoshana… ?”

She nodded, confirming his fears. “It will be all right, my love. I will help make it all right. I’ll take care of you, Adam.”