Breakable You (2 page)

When Maud graduated from high school, Adam had missed the ceremony, and when she graduated from college he'd missed that one too. He'd had good excuses: lecture tours or booksellers' conventions or something—she couldn't remember. These events might actually have taken place, and Adam might actually have attended them, but that was of secondary importance to Eleanor. What mattered to her was that she'd learned, long after the fact, that on both occasions Adam had been traveling with another woman.

Not the same woman: it turned out that Adam had been having affairs for years. "Brief and meaningless" affairs, as he'd characterized them during their one wretched attempt at marriage counseling. And although Eleanor, now, was sure that Adam
would
be in Prague on the night of Maud's convocation ceremony, just as he'd said, she also knew that he'd be traveling with Thea.

She realized that there
was
a use for the grapefruit.

"I was wondering why I ordered this," she said. "And now I know."

She leaned across the table and tried to ram the pink pulpy plane of it into his face. If she'd succeeded it would have been glorious, but he saw it coming and pulled back his head, and because she was insufficiently committed to the gesture—committed enough to lean forward but not enough to rise from her seat—she couldn't reach him.

"Very nice," he said. "Very James Cagney. Now let's get out of here."

People were looking at them—as brief as her clumsy attack had been, she'd made a little scene—but she didn't care. Adam called for the check.

They left the restaurant together and walked up Broadway. Adam seemed unfazed by her assault: as always, he was unflappable.

They walked for two blocks in silence. Eleanor was puzzled by how comfortable it felt to walk beside him. She told herself she shouldn't be surprised. During most of their years together, she'd felt secure with him; she'd felt blessedly safe. Since they'd been apart, she'd come to realize that in return for this feeling of safety, she'd given up some of the things that were most important to her. And yet she still had an instinctive nostalgia for the old feeling.

"There's one other thing I wanted to mention," Eleanor said. "Ruth keeps calling me. She says she keeps leaving you messages and you haven't returned them."

Ruth was an old friend of theirs. Her late husband, Izzy, had been Adam's mentor and best friend. Probably his only friend.

"What does she want?" Adam said.

"I don't know. Maybe she just wants to talk to you."

"That would be nice, but it's unlikely."

"Have you been getting her messages?"

He didn't say anything.

"I'll take that as a yes. For Christ's sake, Adam, call the woman. Who knows how much time she has left?"

"Why? Is she sick again?"

"I don't know. All I know is that she wants to talk to you. Have some pity on the poor woman, Adam. She's old, and she's alone, and she's heartbroken."

"No one ever died of a broken heart," Adam said.

"Well, be that as it may," Eleanor said, "I gave her your cellphone number."

Adam looked displeased, a sight that Eleanor found pleasing.

They said good-bye outside her building. She stepped back quickly to avoid a kiss, but he didn't try to kiss her.

Eleanor took the elevator to her apartment, the apartment they had shared for their entire married life. It was huge and full of books and beds and windows. They had raised three children here, and lived by themselves for ten years here after the children were gone. And now it was just her.

She hung up her jacket—she had worn a leather jacket for their meeting, in a doomed effort to seem newly hip and liberated, different from the woman he'd known—and closed the closet door. The outside of the door needed a coat of paint. A full-length mirror used to hang there, and now that it was gone, there was a bright white rectangle in the middle of a field of faded gray. Eleanor had taken down all the mirrors except the one above the bathroom sink. She could look at her face when she needed to, but never had to look at her body.

I would have liked to stay longer in France… It was a wonderful week.

She felt richly humiliated.

She wasn't sure if it would have been better or worse if she'd succeeded in reaching him with that grapefruit.

The most distressing thing about the encounter in the restaurant was that when he'd mentioned James Cagney, it had made her feel close to him. She'd actually been thinking of James Cagney when she picked up the grapefruit—Cagney grinding a grapefruit into Mae Clarke's face in
The Public Enemy
. Adam was the only person she knew who could have guessed this.

She went into the room that she used as a study. It had been Maud's bedroom years ago. Eleanor had put a desk there shortly after Adam moved out. She'd started keeping a diary in a marbled composition book and was trying to write something in it every day.

Sometimes she daydreamed that keeping a diary would lead to other kinds of writing. Maybe she'd write a book about the craft of psychotherapy—a collection of case studies that would be a little like essays and a little like stories. Or maybe she'd write a family memoir. Or maybe she'd even return to the novel that she began when she was in her twenties.

Or maybe she'd write nothing except a diary.

Eleanor had reached a privileged time of life, a time in which you could just give up, if you wanted to, without harming anyone. No one needed her anymore.

Maybe that made it an awful time of life—she wasn't sure.

For many years, she'd been needed, needed above all by their children. The duties of caretaking had lasted much longer than she'd expected—that was one of the biggest surprises about being a mother. And she had also been needed—or she'd thought she was—by Adam. She'd thought that he considered her indispensable, and at the beginning, perhaps, she'd been right about this. He'd once told her that she was the North Star of his moral life, but that was only one of the roles she played for him. The other roles were more practical. She was his first and most trusted reader, his unofficial editor, his unofficial agent; she was his liaison with the world and his shield from the world.

And now all that was over. Adam had a new muse, or at least a new fuckmate. She used this term bitterly, for the shock effect, even though she wasn't even speaking it aloud and was shocking no one but herself.

Eleanor, at fifty-nine, was going to have to start a new life, even if she didn't want to.

It didn't feel like a season for starting over. It was October, and she often looked out the window at the reddening trees in Riverside Park and remembered lines of poetry that she had read long ago, lines like

Now it is autumn and the falling fruit

And the long journey towards oblivion.

The songs she remembered were not songs about renewal but songs about preparing for death.

She wrote a few sentences about her meeting with Adam, and then she rested her head on the desk. Seeing him had so unnerved her that she had to lie down on Maud's bed and take a nap.

When she woke, she remembered that she'd promised Maud that she was going to call her with a recipe for chocolate-chip cookies. She looked for the recipe, couldn't find it, and then she called Maud, who wasn't home, and left an apologetic message on her machine.

As she closed her diary and put it back in the top drawer of her desk, she wondered whether she was fooling herself. Maybe it was just too late for her to start over.

Starting afresh is the great new myth. It's an article of modern faith that everyone
can
. Books and magazines and TV shows and movies were filled with stories about people "reinventing" themselves. But who among us ever does?

Maud saw Sam from half a block away. He was waiting for her at the entrance of the Café de la Gare, the restaurant in Brooklyn Heights where they'd agreed to meet.

Although it was still two days away from Halloween, she had to make her way through a flock of little goblins before she could get to him. This was unfortunate, because the sight of her wading through all these children would surely make Sam more aware of her bigness.

She wished she could make herself small. To be so much taller than he was made her feel impolite. She was five-ten, and he—well, she wasn't sure how tall he was, but she knew that if they were playing basketball, she could dunk over him with ease.

He was standing stiffly at attention, and when she came near him he nodded hello. He didn't try to kiss her, didn't move toward her, didn't even smile.

They hadn't kissed yet. She had encountered him on five earlier occasions, but this was their first date.

She gave him a crisp military salute. His bearing was so formal that it seemed like the appropriate way to greet him.

No reaction.

"What's your name again?" she said.

He looked unsure of whether to answer her.

"I'm just joking," she said. "It's a joke I always make on the first date."

He held open the door for her and they went into the restaurant. The place was crowded, and as they moved between the pressed-together tables she found herself stooping, as if that would somehow make it easier to pass.

They sat down; a waitress arrived; they ordered drinks.

"It's funny to see you in regular-person clothes," she said. He had been working as a carpenter for her friends George and Celia, so she always encountered him in work clothes flecked with sawdust.

He nodded tensely and said nothing.

He was leaning stiffly away from her. He looked as if he thought she was a hit woman—as if he was nervously expecting her to reach into her handbag and pull out her .44.

Maybe the problem was that she was Jewish. Maybe he hates Jews, she thought.

Maybe I hate Arabs. Maybe
that's
the problem.

She didn't think she hated Arabs, but she couldn't be sure. On the one hand, she wanted peace in the Middle East; on the other hand, when she imagined going to bed with him, she imagined it as going to bed with someone who was slightly greasy. Even though in actual fact he seemed very clean.

Sam had been born in New Jersey and had lived on the East Coast all his life—George had told her that. He was as American as she was. But still, he was an
Arab
American, and she'd never even been friendly with an Arab American before.

Show him you're above all that. Show him you've bravely risen above your prejudices. Show him you're
interested
in him.

"George and Celia told me that you used to work for the Arab American Human Rights League."

"Arab American Human Rights Committee. Yes. That's right."

"Did you enjoy it?"

"I'm not sure if enjoyment had anything to do with it. But it was fulfilling."

"So why did you leave?"

"Things can get old."

"Did you get fired? Was there a scandal?"

She was leaning forward with—she was sure of this—an imbecilic grin.
Was there a scandal
? What a dumb question.

Why, she wondered, do silent people always turn the rest of us into babbling idiots?

"Wasn't fired," he said. "No scandal."

He said this in a voice that was barely stronger than a whisper, so she wondered if there
had
been a scandal.

The waitress arrived with their drinks (wine for her, water for him) and took their order. For the next few minutes, neither of them said a word. He kept his eyes on the table as he sipped his drink.

Mumbling, withdrawn, never looking anyone in the eye—he was like a man on the run from the law. Maybe he was a terrorist. In six months, she thought, I'll see his mug shot in the paper. Everyone will be horrified that he once moved unnoticed in our midst.

This was the oddest date she'd ever been on.

"You don't seem to be enjoying yourself," she finally said. "How come you decided to do this?"

"Do what?"

"Have dinner with me."

"I'm not sure. I'm still trying to figure it out."

He was honest, at least. Grant him that.

But, on the other hand, fuck him.

"Well, if you do figure it out, let me know," she said.

He looked very serious suddenly, grave and sympathetic, like a kindly doctor about to deliver bad news.

"I'm sorry, Maud. I really don't mean to be so unfriendly. But I think I shouldn't be here. I'm not looking for anyone right now, and I don't think I'd be a suitable partner for anyone."

"Who's talking about being partners?" she said. "I'm just thinking it would be nice if we made it to the soup."

He smiled. He had a nice smile.

"That sounds like a fine ambition," he said. "Let's try to get to the soup."

George and Celia had known Sam in college. They'd lost touch with him a few years after graduation, and he'd resurfaced only lately, when they were looking for someone to turn their study into a nursery. Someone had given them the phone number of a guy who was supposed to be a good carpenter, and it had turned out to be their old friend.

George had told her that Sam was one of the most interesting people he'd ever known. But the Sam he described to Maud didn't seem like the Sam she'd met. The person George described was an intellectual and a political activist: he'd received a master's degree in political theory at Columbia and had wanted to promote the cause of civil rights for Arab Americans. Just after college he'd gotten the job that George had told Maud about, with the human-rights group. But now he was working as a carpenter.

He used to work as a carpenter in college, George said, to help pay the bills, but George didn't know why he was working full-time as a carpenter now.

George and Celia had made him sound wonderful: intelligent, responsible, ethical, kind. They'd volunteered to set Maud up with him, and that sounded fine to her, but when they got back to her a few days later, they said it turned out that he wasn't interested in dating. They didn't know why. He wasn't married and he wasn't gay, they said, but he wasn't interested.