“It might work,” he said cautiously, caught up in her happiness.

He discovered when they got to Natick that while the car had been parked in Roxbury somebody had stolen the hubcap from the left rear wheel. All the way back to the hospital he sang at the top of his lungs.

15: Adam Silverstone

15

Adam Silverstone

Adam loved the orange-crate bookcases. Inspired, he bought white paint and a roller-and-pan and before the old aches had left his body he had acquired new ones, but the white walls opened the room up, made it a completely different room. On Newbury Street Gaby bought two inexpensive prints, a Käthe Kollwitz reproduction of a peasant mother holding a child, and a colored abstraction of globes and cubes that went well with the paper flowers.

She saved an avocado pit and studded it with toothpick spears and placed it in a glass of water—something she had read about in a magazine—and waited, checking it anxiously. Nothing happened for three weeks but then, just as she had decided she would have to throw it away, it germinated, a little light-green snake of life, a sprout and then a leaf that turned darker-green and glossy after she had transplanted it into rich black dirt she bought in a bag at the supermarket. The avocado added two more leaves, pinnate and shiny, spoonfed on love and plant food in the transitory patch of sun from the single window.

The basement apartment became the frame of their lives; they would not have exchanged it for the White House. They made love happily and very often and with only a little discernible guilt, becoming increasingly knowledgeable of one another. She felt strong and free, a pioneer woman. She knew they were the first and only lovers in the world, even though Adam told her that despite her fantasies and all the books he had read in medical school they would never create an original sin.

For the first time in her memory she was unconcerned about her own body. The only discomfort she suffered was due to the hormonal stresses of the pill, to which she was not yet attuned and which at times brought on wracking bouts of morning sickness. Adam promised her the symptoms would go away.