“Sure,” said Tal, with a heavy exhale. “Let’s go.”
They sat in silence over the glistening ribbon of the East River, but once the grim houses of Queens gave way to the strip malls of western Long Island, Tuck leaned in toward the driver’s seat.
“So you found God?” he asked Tal.
“What?” said Sadie.
Tal smiled, keeping his eyes fixed on the road ahead of him, and said, “I wouldn’t put it like that.”
“What?” asked Sadie again. “What are you talking about?”
Tuck nodded, ignoring her. “I can understand that.” He nodded again and lolled his head lightly against the window. For a moment, Sadie thought that they might continue in silence, as befit the occasion, but then he sat up again. “I just never saw you as the religious type.”
Tal shrugged.
“Tal?” said Sadie, unsure, even, of what to ask him.
“So what are you?” Tuck pressed. “Lubovitch?”
“Tuck, what are you talking about?” Sadie swiveled fully around to face Tuck, but he refused to meet her eye. He’d pulled off his jacket, she saw, and rolled up the sleeves of his white shirt. The hair on his forearms was turning gray. And his face had lost all of the softness she’d seen after the service.
For a moment, Tal turned from the road and looked back, wearily, at his companion on this bleak journey. “No,” he said. “Not Lubovitch. Not even close. The opposite.”
“But you’re religious, right?” Tuck pressed, with a slight guffaw. “Was it like, one of those guys stopped you on the street and asked if you were Jewish—and next thing you know you’re in the mitzvah mobile? Didn’t they, like, recognize you from that Robin Williams movie?”
Tal said nothing.
“Sorry,” Tuck offered. “I’m an asshole.”
“You are,” Tal agreed.
“Tal?” said Sadie. He had not, she saw, taken off his yarmulke when they left the synagogue, but then neither had Dr. Roth or many of the other men. “We all thought—”
“Oh, come on, Sadie,” said Tuck. “Are you blind?”
“You don’t need to take that tone with her, okay?” said Tal, turning his head sharply toward Tuck.
“Tal, what—” Sadie began, then stopped herself. Did she really need to ask? When she thought about it, it all made sense. He had always questioned the purpose of everything. She thought back over the years, trying to piece the story together: the ulpan, the retreat, back when she was pregnant with Jack. The note Lil had told them about, saying he’d nearly given up acting. And then mostly silence. Back in college, she thought, he’d railed against his parents’ materialism, their hypocrisy. But they all had, hadn’t they? “We thought,” she said, not knowing where these words would lead. “We thought you were taking a break. From acting. What have—”
“We can talk about it later,” he said. “After.”
“Sadie will have to get home to her children later,” said Tuck, with such venom that the tears she’d been suppressing all afternoon finally rushed into her eyes and down her face. Why did he hate her so?
“Oh my God,” she said, wiping her eyes with a fist. “I can’t believe this. Tuck, don’t do this.”
“What?” said Tuck. “I’m telling the truth.”
“It’s not a big deal,” said Tal. “I’ll give you the sixty-second version, okay?” He glanced in the rearview mirror at Tuck. “I’d been unhappy. I wanted all these things that seemed unattainable, that everyone, my parents, told me I could never have—”
“Fame,” said Tuck
“No,” said Tal. “Not fame.”
“He just wanted to be an actor,” said Sadie loyally, though she wasn’t sure she believed this; there had been something more rapacious in Tal, the thing that had allowed him to succeed where Emily failed.
“Yeh.” Tal shrugged. “And it turned out that I could be. That it was attainable. I’d wanted it for so long, my whole life, and then when I had it, it wasn’t so exciting. You know?”
“Yes,” said Tuck, in a small voice that made Sadie, again, feel sorry for him.
“That’s the rational part,” said Tal, who seemed to be warming to the task of revealing himself. And now, suddenly, she wanted to know, wanted to know everything, every minute he’d spent apart from her. Her mind began racing. Was there a wife somewhere—in Israel? In L.A.?—wearing a wig and a long, heavy skirt? Was there a baby with Tal’s angular face and long arms? And how did he make a living? The Orthodox couldn’t act, could they? Was he Orthodox? What did he mean, the opposite of Lubovitch? Had he just thrown everything away? Oh God, oh God, she thought, I hope not. But then, what difference would it make?
“The irrational part is just that I felt this longing to know,” Tal was saying.
“To know what?” asked Tuck, leaning forward into the space between the two front seats. “Can I smoke in here?”
“No,” said Sadie.
“The prayers that my grandfather knew. Things like that. The truth.”
Ahead of them, on the LIE, traffic had come to a standstill and Sadie groaned.
“Please stop,” she said. She was succumbing, she knew, to temper. As she did more and more these days, though poor Ed bore the brunt of it. “Please just stop talking. Please. I have a headache. I just, I can’t listen anymore.” Her breasts, stuffed inside the wool dress, had turned to rocks. Why had she not simply asked Tal if she could run to the bathroom before they left? The pump, no, was not in her bag, but she could have hand pumped, like the chipper hippies in the Dr. Sears book. “Please,” she said. “Just for a minute.”
Both men wore a similar—and familiar—expression of befuddlement, one she’d seen, occasionally, on Ed’s face lately. Okay, crazy person, they seemed to be saying. But she wasn’t crazy, she was tired, and she didn’t want to hear about Tal’s conversations with God or whatever. This was why she’d cheated on him, why she’d left him, wasn’t it? This hokey earnestness. It was too much. She wanted Tal back the way he was in college, when they’d walked around campus at midnight, the trees a looming canopy above them, and she’d felt so happy and lucky it was all she could do not to hug him with joy, when they were friends, such good friends, and she could talk with him about anything, without fear of judgment, before things had become complicated, before she’d succumbed. She wanted him the way he’d been the summer before Lil’s wedding, when they’d laughed at Dave’s sulks and moods, and spent their evenings drinking wine in one café or another, when he’d been on the verge of breaking through, the two of them giddy with possibility. Was this why she’d fallen, crashingly, in love with him? And had she really left him because she knew him too well, loved him too much, because she’d needed him so terribly? Such an old story. An ancient story. A cliché. Did she love Ed less? Or Michael, whose very name still made her flush with guilt, yes, but also desire? No, probably no. But falling in love at thirty was different, so different, than falling in love at eighteen. It was never the same, was it?
“Please stop,” she said again, almost without thinking, dropping her head into her hands. “Please. I think I’m a little carsick.”
“We’re not getting anywhere anyway,” said Tuck. Off the exit to their right, a neon sign in the shape of a martini blinked erratically. “We could have a drink.” Around them, cars were frantically trying to get across traffic and over to the exit.
To Sadie’s surprise, Tal said, “Sure. Why not,” and scooted the car over a lane, up the exit, and onto some downtown byway that looked as though it had seen better days. Where were they? Babylon? Great Neck? Someplace that had once been a real town, with a barbershop and a grocer and a pharmacy, but was now just a conglomeration of oversized houses on undersized plots serviced by a series of malls and car dealerships. Tal coasted the car down the street until they arrived at the tall sign that had beckoned to Tuck, parking in the decrepit lot beneath it, weeds sprouting from cracks in the gray, pebbly asphalt.