Breakable You (17 page)

She had once explained to Adam that when life started to change for her, she quickly resolved that she wasn't going to make the mistake her mother had made. Her mother had been born beautiful, and the way she was treated all her life made it easy for her to believe that she possessed a kind of natural royalty. When her beauty faded, she was left without resources. She hadn't made adequate provision for the cold second half of her life, and she spent her last years in a baffled haze, convinced that one more session at the hairdresser's or one more tiny pinch of plastic surgery would return her from her exile, would make the world bow down to her again.

Thea, by contrast, knew that her attractiveness was a card that couldn't be played forever. It was a magic ticket that provided entree practically everywhere, but a ticket with an expiration date. She was going to use it while it could be used, but she intended to make sure that she had other, more durable assets, long before it was gone.

"Have you had any time to work on your biography of Izzy?" Adam said.

"Not really," Jeffrey said. "I didn't have any free time in the first place, and now with this gig with the foundation, I have less than no free time."

This gig: he was trying to sound as if it were something he took casually, but he was obviously excited by his newfound power. It was clear that his sense of his own worth had ballooned since they had seen him last. His movements were slower and more rounded, and there was a new quality of ripeness in his way of speaking, as if he were listening to himself through headphones. He was trying on the part of the distinguished man.

When he excused himself to say good-bye to a friend who was leaving the party, Adam and Thea just looked at each other. Adam felt sure that Thea knew what he was thinking.

He was thinking that there must be a way to exploit Jeffrey's new position. Adam had won most of the fancy prizes, but he hadn't won anything lately. He had won two Jewish awards, but it would be good to win another.

"Prizes," Thea said.

Adam nodded.

"Prizes are for old men who are finished," Thea said.

Adam shook his head. "Prizes are good."

"Would you like me to help?" she said. And then: "Silly question." Meaning that of course he would.

And she was right. Adam himself couldn't make the case that he deserved an award. There were some people who could do such a thing, but Adam couldn't. During the years of being Ellie's husband he had lived under a regime of enforced highmindedness, and had gained a reputation as someone who didn't grubbily grab for things, didn't blow his own horn. It would not be wise to endanger that reputation at this late date.

"Have you told him about the book yet?" Thea said. She was referring to Izzy's novel.

"I'd prefer that he didn't know about the book. Not yet."

He knew what she was thinking: she was looking for something he might offer, something he might dangle in front of Jeffrey's nose. But it was a delicate matter. She couldn't tell Jeffrey that if he gave Adam a prize, Adam would give him something that would turn a biography of Izzy into a "literary event." She couldn't, that is, try to bribe him explicitly. She had to find a way to imply it.

"I wouldn't mind letting him know about Izzy's letters," Adam said.

"His letters."

"Yes. Izzy made copies of all his letters. Which could use a suitable editor, if they're ever going to be published in book form."

"That's good," she said.

"If I had to leave soon," Adam said, "Jeffrey probably wouldn't be disappointed."

"Probably not."

They both knew that Thea could do more for him if he was gone.

He had complete faith in her. He knew that she wouldn't stain the conversation with any vulgar implication of reciprocity. He knew that she would play her part perfectly.

What he anticipated was something like this. She would lead Jeffrey into a conversation about Adam, suggesting that he would be the perfect person to receive a Gellman award. Not a boringly obvious choice, like one of the patriarchs, but not a controversial choice either. And then at some other point in the conversation she would mention that Adam had been looking through Izzy's letters lately, and that a few scholars had already been in touch with him about them, hoping to put them together in a book.

She would put these ideas out there, and that would be all. She would scatter the seeds in Jeffrey's mind, where they might or might not grow.

This might not be the way Thea would act if she were trying to get something for herself. She might be more direct, more brutal. She liked to blow the doors down. But she knew Adam well enough to know that that wouldn't be the way to get something for him. If she wanted to help Adam she'd have to do it in the style that he himself preferred. And she had observed him closely enough to be familiar with his style of manipulating people.

Adam was a cheerful manipulator. One of the things he had learned about manipulating people is that you can't be too attached to the results. If this gambit didn't succeed, there was no harm done; he wasn't going to sit around lamenting the injustice of it all. Because there wouldn't be any injustice.

Adam never took anything personally. People who took insults and disappointments personally, he believed, were people who made the mistake of thinking that something was owed them in the first place. Adam didn't think that anything was owed to us except suffering and death. If good things did happen to you, they usually happened because you were lucky or because you'd stolen them. He had set out to steal as many of the good things as he could, but it was part of his code to be clear-eyed about what he was doing. He knew that he was stealing them, so when his efforts didn't work out, he was never offended or hurt. He accepted defeat gracefully, as he tried to accept everything gracefully.

"Thank you, my dear."

His relationship with Thea was entirely one of convenience, and both of them knew it. There was no crudely concrete quid pro quo in their relationship, but each of them was using the other, frankly and unapologetically. For Adam, their infrequent excursions in bed together were gratifying, but what was actually more gratifying was being seen with her in public, and if he had to choose one or the other, it was the public element of their coupling that he would choose.

And in turn he had introduced her to a wider world. She had gotten the job with Charlie Rose through connections she had made because of him. He hadn't made them for her, but he'd smoothed the way.

Adam and Thea found Jeffrey again near the bar. Adam shook his hand. "I used to be a night owl," Adam said, "but I can't seem to stay awake past ten anymore. It's time for me to go."

"I'm still awake, though," Thea said to Jeffrey. "And hungry. I need someone to take me out to dinner."

Jeffrey looked unsure of how to respond. The party was still in full swing.

"Have dinner with me, Lipkin," Thea said. "The old man left me his credit card. It's all on him."

"She's right," Adam said. "It's on me. In celebration of your new stature."

He shook Jeffrey's hand and kissed Thea, and was off. At home he got into a pair of pajamas and made himself a cup of hot cocoa. It was delicious to be inside and alone and warm on a cold December night, while the incomparable Thea was working on his behalf. Life was good.

Samir wasn't sure whether the difficult part was over or was just beginning. A month ago, he would wake up every morning thinking that things with Maud were starting to get too heavy, and that he would have to break up with her, and every evening his cock would be in her mouth. Had that been the difficult part, because he'd felt so torn? Or the easy part, because sex was the only thing they'd had?

Now things were not so clear. They were still having sex every time they got together, but they were also spending time together before and after sex, and it was then that the complexities came in.

He felt himself coming alive, and it was painful. It was like a scene in a movie, where the klieg lights are thrown on one by one, illuminating more and more of the set. First his sexual life had come alive. Then his intellectual life: he became more and more interested in the things she had to say.

And then his tenderness. He kept remembering the story she'd told him about her tonsillectomy—waving at her parents as she was being wheeled away in a red wagon, with no idea that she was headed for something that would cause pain, and waking up in a strange bed the next morning, and telling her parents, in a tiny, scratchy voice, that her throat hurt.

One night a few weeks after she told him this story, they were in his apartment, and he was making something for dinner and she was reading on the couch, and he craned his neck to see what she was reading and he saw that it was something by Fichte, and he marveled, as he always did, at the difficulty of the thinkers in whose company she spent her time, and thought about her essential purity—the purity of her interests, the purity of the way she pursued them—and her purity seemed a kind of innocence, and he was struck, more powerfully than he'd been at the moment when he'd actually heard the story, by the image of her sitting in the red wagon, waving good-bye to her parents, happy and proud, unaware of where the wagon was going to take her. The thought of her innocence, the thought that she had been misled by the people who loved her—all of it made him wish he could step into her past and protect her from harm, or at the very least be there when she woke up after her operation with the ice cream that had been promised to her.

These feelings caught him by surprise. He had never felt this kind of protectiveness toward anyone except his daughter.

She looked up from her book and smiled at him. "Whatcha lookin' at, big guy?"

"Just looking," he said.

He remembered the tide of a poem he had read in college. "Surprised by Joy."

During these weeks, as he felt himself changing, Samir sometimes observed the process with a sort of detached curiosity. He was curious about what he would become. Curious to find out whether his new self was going to be his old self reclaimed, as if he'd left it in storage for a few years, or whether it was going to be something entirely unknown. He wondered, for example, whether his interest in the world would return—his old passions, his old anger.

In his old life, he had worked for a series of human-rights organizations, and finally at the Arab American Human Rights Committee. He'd liked the job, and he never really thought about leaving.

When he went back to work after his daughter's death, he fulfilled his obligations on automatic pilot, dutifully putting out bulletins and research reports and "AAHRC Action Alerts!" He might as well have been writing beer commercials for all it mattered to him, but he thought that if he just went through the motions for a while, he would eventually start to care again.

On a Tuesday morning a little less than a month after Zahra's death, he was working from home, transcribing an interview with a Palestinian American academic that he'd recorded the month before, when his phone rang. He heard his grandmother's voice on the answering machine, talking about something she'd seen on CNN. He turned the volume down, intending to call her back after he'd finished working.

His grandmother was a sad creature. She had spent the fifteen years of her widowhood sitting in front of the television. She would come alive during those periods when the entire country was supposedly riveted on one event: she would click avidly from CNN to MSNBC to Fox News and call Samir several times a day to give him updates. As she delivered these updates, Samir would leaf through the newspaper or check his e-mail and pretend to listen.

On that morning, she called a few more times. He could hear her voice faintly on the answering machine but he couldn't hear what she was saying. Finally, after the fourth or fifth call, he picked up.

When she said that he had to turn on the TV because two planes had flown into the World Trade Center, he was annoyed. He visualized two light planes gliders or four-seaters. A sad event for the people involved, but of no importance whatsoever compared to the larger things that were going on in the world.

Exactly the sort of thing that the all-news networks like to milk for days.

"They're gone," she said.

"What's gone?"

"The World Trade towers. They're gone."

"What do you mean they're gone?"

"Haven't you been listening to me? They crumbled. They disappeared."

This was how he heard.

He called his office, thinking they'd need him, but everything was in such confusion that his boss told him to stay home. Leila came home in the middle of the day and the two of them sat in front of the television and neither of them could take it in. He understood with his rational mind that it was an event in the world, out there, but the event was so huge as to punch a hole in the wall that separated the rational mind from the dream mind, and in the dream part of his mind he felt as if this was the world's attempt to do justice to Zahra's death.

He even felt, in some remote corner of his brain, a touch of
satisfaction
. During the previous days he had hated the world's indifference, its obvious belief that it need not stop, need not kneel, to mark the death of his daughter. So after the towers fell, amid the welter of his other feelings, there was a small note of something oddly like vindication, because much of the world was now plunged into a mourning to match his own.

That was an immediate, unthinking response. In the next few days, other responses followed. It ceased to feel as if the world were bowing to Zahra's death. It began to feel like the opposite. The world's indifference had grown even larger. It was as if Zahra's death had been robbed of its meaning. No one he spoke to, even old friends, had a thought to spare for her anymore.

On the day the towers fell, he hoped that it was the work of anyone but Arabs. He wanted the culprits to be crazed Americans, Timothy McVeigh-ish inveighers against the CIA, the FDA, the Trilateral Commission, the blacks, the Jews, and fluoride. He was angry when the television commentators, within hours of the attacks, had all nominated Osama bin Laden as the probable "mastermind." And he was despondent when it began to seem as if, this time, they were right.