Breakable You (16 page)

He took off his glasses and closed his eyes and rubbed them.

"I don't know whether you'll really want to hear this," he said, "but I've never loved her the way I loved you."

He opened his eyes and looked directly at her. Without his glasses, his eyes looked naked.

Her liver-spotted hands, still on her thighs, were trembling.

She'd probably wanted him to say something like this, but now that he'd said it, it disturbed her. It made her sad for him. It was like a confession that he hadn't grown.

But had
she
grown? Hadn't she spent decades avoiding the truth about Adam, because she hadn't had the courage to leave him?

The cafe was filled with young people, having hip and witty conversations, presumably. They looked like young conquerors. She wondered how many of them, even now, were making the mistakes that would hobble them for the rest of their lives.

"That was a long time ago," she said.

Is it possible, she thought, for a person to get
two
honorary doctorates?

"Sometimes it feels that way," he said. "Sometimes it feels like it was yesterday."

The afternoon declined into awkwardness and small talk. Journeys end in lovers meeting, she thought, but not always.

He was meeting Kate at the Metropolitan Museum. Eleanor accompanied him into Central Park. The broken beauty of winter in New York. They were walking in a chilly wind; she pulled her collar closer around her throat.

Somewhere in the middle of the park, he took her hand, and they walked that way. Her hand was sweating madly.

When they reached Fifth Avenue, he asked if she wanted to meet Kate. He looked at his watch. "She's usually no more than forty-five minutes late."

"I'd love to, but another time. It's been an emotional day."

"Can I get you a cab?" he said.

"Thank you. But I think I'd like to walk."

When they said good-bye, they embraced, and then he took a step back, to look at her. The way he looked at her made her worries about her appearance fade. For a moment she felt like a desirable creature, rather than the shapeless old handbag she knew herself to be, the woman in a dress that was like a circus tent. He had once told her that she was the light of the world.

She walked for a minute or two, and then, as soon as she was sure that she was out of his range of vision, she stopped and waited for the crosstown bus. She'd had no intention of walking all the way home; she'd told him she wanted to walk only in an effort to seem like a poetic being, someone who lived outside of the world of subways and buses and cabs.

Amazing that on the verge of sixty, you still put on such airs.

When she got home she took off her jacket and sweater and scarf, went to Maud's old room, and started writing. Suddenly she had a lot to write about.

If Patrick were to be believed, he had spent nearly forty years longing for her. As she sat writing about their afternoon, she had to admit to herself that she hadn't felt the same way about him. He had remained in her mind as the person she respected most, the man who had more integrity than anyone else she'd ever met, but she hadn't spent all these years pining after him.

We wish for a symmetry of feeling, but we rarely get it. It is painful to be the one who loves more, and painful to be the one who loves less.

Patrick had never known the real story of what happened when she left him. He had thought she left him in a kind of delirium after the death of her sister. He didn't know that she'd been planning to leave him even before Joanna died. She'd already met Adam, and she'd already decided that she was going to marry him.

Thinking about it clearly and seriously, she admitted something she'd never admitted to herself before. Although she had loved Patrick as she'd never loved Adam, the choices she made when she threw Patrick over, took up with Adam, and accompanied him to New York, were choices she would make all over again, even knowing, as she knew now, that Patrick was the better man. She had probably known it even then. She hadn't been in a state of temporary insanity when she chose Adam. She had chosen Adam with her eyes open.

For years she had been telling herself that the only reason she didn't regret the choices she made back then was that her marriage to Adam had produced their children. But now she admitted to herself that there were other reasons as well. When she made the choice, she wasn't just choosing a person; she was choosing a life. She had thought that Adam could introduce her to a wider world than Patrick could. And she'd been right. She didn't want to stay in Portland and be a labor organizer's wife. She didn't want to listen to stories about negotiating sessions and the effort to get a cost-of-living clause inserted into the contract of the United Brotherhood of Pulp Mashers; she didn't want to socialize with labor organizers and their wives. She respected these people completely; she thought that the work they were doing was as noble as any work in the world. And yet she hadn't wanted to live out her life among them. Their nervous grasping for respectability—they were always saying, "Between you and I," or, after using some perfectly ordinary profanity, "Pardon my French." She believed that their concerns were broad and serious: the fate of working people, the future of equality, the effort to wrest a measure of fairness from an unfair system. And yet their concerns had always felt small to her. Not small, really, but drab.

In her twenties, Patrick, as much as she cared for him, was Portland; Patrick was the provinces. Adam was the promise of New York.

At twenty-two, when she had imagined a life with Patrick, she had imagined living a closed-in life that hardly changed from year to year. When she had imagined a life with Adam, she had imagined parties, literary gossip, the drama of Manhattan, a never-ending sense of the new. In choosing between two men, she had chosen between two lives, and the life she had imagined was not too far from the life she had gone on to live. She had enjoyed the world that Adam had given her: she had enjoyed the trips to Paris and London and Amsterdam, the monthlong residencies at Bellagio; she had enjoyed meeting Norman Mailer and Susan Sontag and Joyce Carol Oates. She might not have loved Adam as genuinely as she'd loved Patrick, but she'd found him more exciting.

It was still exciting, even now, to remember her first weekend in Manhattan with Adam. She was officially still seeing Patrick, but she'd sneaked off to New York to be with Adam during the week between Christmas and New Year's. Adam introduced her to his writer friends; he took her on a carriage ride in the park; and on New Year's Eve he took her to dinner at the Rainbow Room, with the city glittering below them. It was the middle of the 1960s, but although Adam was only a few years older than she was, he seemed to belong to a different era, and he seemed to be offering her some timeless New York, where the streets were rain-washed and glistening and the soundtrack wasn't Jim Morrison and Mick Jagger but Cole Porter and George Gershwin. It was as if he were lifting her up out of her life. As the new year came in, they were dancing, and it felt as if life's most extravagant promises could come true, and she closed her eyes and put her head on his shoulder and pressed closer to him, as the band played "Embraceable You."

She spent about an hour at the desk in Maud's old room, writing about all this. She would have stayed there longer, but her fingers had started to lock up.

It was an hour, but it was also thirty-seven years. The woman who rose from the desk had a different past than the woman who had sat down in front of it.

Thea, across the room, with a delighted expression, was talking to a young man, laughing at something he'd said. Her head was thrown back, offering him a view of her brilliant throat. The man looked pleased, but also unsure of himself, as if she was laughing at a remark that he hadn't intended to be witty.

This was Thea: she could make you feel flattered and insecure at the same time.

Adam handed his coat to the cloakroom attendant and started toward her. He didn't mind seeing Thea flirting with other men. He rather enjoyed it.

It was an end-of-the-year party given by the
Los Angeles Times Book Review
. They held one party in LA and another in New York. Adam had been going for years; Thea had never been to one before, and she had been excited about it all day.

He gave her a wide berth. He didn't know who the man was, but Thea was clearly, as she liked to put it, "working him"—he was obviously someone who could be useful to her, and Adam knew enough not to interfere. So he just stood with his drink and took in the scene.

The room was dotted with celebrities from the world of literature and performance. E. L. Doctorow, remote behind his air of suave imperturbability, was talking to Laurie Anderson, who was, as always, carefully disheveled, and Lou Reed, who had the pruny monkeyish face of somebody's grandfather, but who was imperishably hip—the hippest man in the room, in any room, by definition.

Philip Levine, the poet, was holding forth to two attractive young women. Levine was wearing a baseball cap and a duck-hunting jacket. He had grown up in Detroit and had worked briefly in an auto factory, and although he'd spent the last fifty years exclusively in academic and literary circles, he still cultivated the image of a rough-hewn member of the laboring class. If you didn't know better you might have thought that he'd come straight to the party from the assembly line.

Adam noted this not in a critical way, but with admiration. Everyone, he thought, needs an act, and Levine's had served him well.

Adam's own act had never been so elaborate. His height had done a lot of the work for him, and Ellie had done the rest. She had been so relentlessly nice—so generous, so warm—that he was able to be laconic and ironic and unapproachable without anyone considering him a shit. Ellie was gone, but Thea had replaced her—she'd much more than replaced her: she was like a young actress who had stolen a role from a faded star and infused the entire production with new life. The production being Adam. Thea made him seem, not exactly younger, but more contemporary.

Her work completed, Thea joined him, kissing him on the cheek.

"Have you been enjoying yourself?" he said.

"I always enjoy myself."

"That's what I like about you."

"Have you noticed?" she said. "Your young striver is here." She indicated a man across the room. It was Jeffrey Lipkin, the professor who had the literary crush on Izzy Cantor.

She caught his eye, and Lipkin walked over to them.

"Jeffrey," Adam said. "So good to see you. I've heard about your good news. Congratulations."

A few weeks ago,
The New York Observer
had run a story about the Gellman Foundation, an old, distinguished Jewish philanthropic organization, and its vigorous new president, who wanted to give more attention to the arts. As one of his initiatives, he was launching a program whereby literary prizes would be awarded yearly to Jewish writers and visual artists. To Adam's surprise, Jeffrey had been one of three people appointed as permanent judges for the literary prizes. "That little nerd is going to be controlling hundreds of thousands of dollars in awards?" Thea had said when Adam showed her the article. "That's why one must always be cordial to everyone, even little nerds," Adam had said.

Now, at the party, Thea raised her glass to Jeffrey. "You must be feeling pretty good," she said. "You're a kingmaker."

"I wouldn't say that," Jeffrey murmured. "I'm just happy to have this chance to do something for Jewish culture. For the culture as a whole, really." He seemed to be impressed by his own modesty.

"I guess I'll have to stop making fun of your eating habits," Thea said. "So give us the inside scoop. Who's getting the big prizes this year?"

"I'm not at liberty to say."

"Can we guess? And you'll tell us if we're right or wrong?"

"We don't have to guess," Adam said. "If you're giving out two prizes, they're going to Bellow and Roth. Three, then it's Bellow and Roth and Ozick."

Jeffrey was silent, with a happily owlish expression. Glad to be important enough to have a secret.

"Bellow and Roth," Thea said, and, with one of the occasional outbursts of vulgarity that never ceased to surprise him, she stuck her index finger down her throat and mimed the act of vomiting.

"What's wrong with Bellow and Roth?" Jeffrey said.

"The patriarchs," she said. "Between them they've put out something like a hundred books, and in all those years of chatter, all those forests laid to waste, neither of them has been able to come up with one lifelike woman character."

"I don't know if that's true," Jeffrey said. "Certainly women aren't their strong suit. But the daughter in
American Pastoral-
—she's a destructive force, but she's also very human. She's not
nice
, but she's very real."

"First of all," Thea said, "that's debatable. And second, even if it's true, it proves my point. You can only point to one example to make your case, and she's an example of woman at her most destructive."

What Adam found especially impressive about Thea at this moment was that he knew that, other than
Portnoy's Complaint
and a few pages of
Herzog
, she hadn't read a word by Roth or Bellow.

Thea's way of flirting with men was to fight with them. It was a quality Adam found appealing. His previous mistress had been a young woman who ostentatiously deferred to power and status: she would treat Adam's every utterance with astonishment, as if he summed up in each casual phrase some idea she had been struggling to articulate for years. It was flattering at first but soon grew tiresome.

"Let me know when the decisions are announced," Thea said. "Maybe I can get you on Charlie's show. You and one of the patriarchs."

Jeffrey looked intoxicated. A beautiful woman was inviting him to appear on TV. This was probably his idea of heaven.

"At least if it's a slow news day," she added.

Thea's beauty was something she used; it was a tool that she wielded in an impersonal way. When she was growing up, she'd once told Adam, she had been quite plain, and she'd grown used to being ignored. When she blossomed, suddenly and startlingly, during her sophomore year in high school, she'd already had too many years' experience of being plain to make the mistake of identifying herself with her looks. Suddenly boys were talking to her.
Men
were talking to her—whenever she was out in public, grown men, men who had wives and children and careers, were drifting over and trying to strike up conversations. But she knew she was the same person she'd always been.