Breakable You (21 page)

But it was true, and he knew it, that for more than ten years now he'd been on cruise control.

He was at his desk, writing, when he received word that Ruth had died. It was nine in the morning. He had already been working for an hour, but he had barely written a word. He had been distracted for weeks now—
hasn't done much lately
—and he had spent most of the morning looking himself up on Google and thinking about creating new e-mail accounts, with fanciful names, in order to write favorable reviews of his own books on Amazon.com.

He got the news from Ellie, who had gotten it from some member of her shadowy society of women, the righteous society of brave, plucky women living alone. Ellie had never liked Ruth: the quality of Ruth's devotion to Izzy had always struck Ellie as doglike. But after Izzy left Ruth by dying and Adam left Ellie by leaving, Ellie had embraced her, a new and honored member of the sacred female order of the insulted, the injured, and the ignored.

Evidently Ruth's cancer had returned several months ago, and she'd never told anyone about it.

"I guess there'll be a memorial service," Adam said.

"I guess so. I suppose you'll speak. I suppose you'll be the star."

It was too early in the morning to be subjected to her bitterness. He said good-bye and hung up.

No more Ruth.

He wondered if Ruth would still be alive if he'd been truthful with her.

Maud was standing in front of the classroom when everything changed. Her breasts had been aching for three days, and she had been thinking it was because she and Samir had been a little rough that weekend. She was listening to one of her students talk about the "Adam Smith problem"—the contradiction between the ideas of human nature implied by Smith's two major works,
The Wealth of Nations
and
The Theory of Moral Sentiments
—when she realized that she was pregnant.

I can't be pregnant.

Of
course I'm pregnant.

The basic question was whether individuals are motivated primarily by self-interest
(The Wealth of Nations)
or by sympathy
(The Theory of Moral Sentiments)
.

"It was like he wasn't communicating with himself," the student said. "It was like on one day he didn't know the things he knew the day before."

"That can happen," Maud said. There was a silence. Perhaps her students were expecting her
to
say something wise, but she had nothing wise to say.

After class she went to Rite Aid, bought a home-pregnancy-test kit, walked back to campus, locked herself in a stall in a women's room in Butler Library, and opened the package. The kit conveniently came with three testing strips, and she tested herself three times. She was pregnant the first time, and then she was pregnant, and then she was pregnant.

I'm pregnant.

She tried to think about it further, but that was about as far as she got.

Two days later, Maud still hadn't told anyone her news. She needed to talk to someone, but she didn't know who.

She placed her books in her backpack, left the library, and walked through the Columbia campus toward Broadway.

She sometimes thought this campus was her favorite spot on earth. The wide calm walkways; the grandeur of the structures; the long green lawns. Sometimes when she walked here on a quiet night, she felt as if she were walking through history. William James had lectured here, and John Dewey, and Alain Locke, and Horace Kallen.

Passing in front of Low Library, with its long stone stairway, she felt connected to the past, to the ghosts of these thinkers, men and women who had hurled themselves against the inexpressible, and to the shades of future thinkers, people who would devote their lives to serious thought in the decades and centuries after she herself was gone.

She found it stunning to contemplate the idea that she had become the host of a two-celled organism that, if left to develop unhindered, would become a human being. She had never believed in God, but she did believe in a sort of divinity of everyday life: the sheer mystery of human consciousness, the fact that mere
matter
somehow gave birth to mind, called forth from her an intense reverence. So the idea that something was taking place inside her that would yield a being with a consciousness was not one that she could easily dismiss.

But at the same time, she didn't
want
to have a baby. She didn't want to have to take care of anyone else. She didn't know if she could handle it.

She felt lucky that the man it had happened with was Samir. Thank God it hadn't happened to her during her promiscuous years. When she thought of all the dopes she'd been with, all the jerks who'd lurched into her yurt—when she thought that it could have been one of them who had fathered her child, she felt disgusted.

Who could she talk to?

She couldn't talk to Samir. Not yet. Not until she had a clearer idea of what she wanted.

She was a little afraid of him. Afraid of how he'd react. He might go down on his knees before her, or he might throw her out the door.

She couldn't tell her mother, because her mother would be so worried—worried about her well-being—that she wouldn't be able to give any sensible advice.

Anyway, she was pretty sure she knew what her mother would think. Her mother would have trouble coming right out and saying it, but she'd want her to have an abortion. Her mother would think she couldn't handle having a child.

She couldn't talk to her father because she wasn't even sure he'd be interested.

Either of her brothers? Nope.

She thought of a friend of hers, Sally Burke, who would probably have some good things to say. Sally was a woman in her forties whom Maud had met in a tai-chi class. For some reason Maud thought that she would understand what she was going through. But it had been a long time since they'd spoken, and it would be too awkward to call her up out of the blue to talk about being pregnant.

George and Celia, the people who introduced her to Samir? No. Conflict of interest.

The only person she wanted to talk to, the only person she
could
talk to, was her old friend Ralph.

She had met Ralph on the very first day of college. They'd become friends quickly and had remained friends ever since. She trusted him as much as she trusted anyone in the world.

She didn't call him. She just took the bus to the East Side. He lived alone in a huge apartment on Park Avenue. Whenever she visited she felt as if she should hand the doorman her card, but she didn't have a card.

The doorman called upstairs, and Ralph asked him to let her up. When she got out of the elevator, Ralph's door was open and he was waiting for her in his wheelchair.

He'd been diagnosed with muscular dystrophy seven years ago, and had been steadily ceding ground to the disease. He hadn't needed a wheelchair until a year ago.

If possible, he looked even more purified, more abstract, more ephemeral, than he had the last time she'd seen him. Less made for this world. More ready to leave it.

"To what do I owe the… Maud. You look like you've… what's going on?"

"Can I talk to you? Do you have time?"

"Of course."

He nodded toward the living room, and remained in his wheelchair while she sat on the couch.

"Tell me everything," he said.

She was about to speak, was trying to figure out where to begin, when she lost control of herself. She put her head in her hands. She couldn't have expressed how relieved she felt, just because of his willingness to listen to her. She knew him well enough to be sure that he would listen to her without judgment.

She had a moment of sadness about her mother, who listened for a living, but who, Maud was sure, would not be able to listen to her, not about this. She'd have advice, worries, opinions. That wasn't what Maud wanted now.

She talked for a long time, in too much detail. What it came down to was that she didn't know if she was strong enough to be a mother, and that she hadn't known Samir long enough to know if she could raise a child with him.

Ralph listened, his patient, small, slightly monkeyish face twisted in an awkward expression of sympathy. His disease had deprived his face of some of its mobility, so that all the nuances of his delicate and expressive nature now had to find a way to manifest themselves in stiff and brittle features.

"What do you think?" she said. "Doc."

"I think four things. The first thing I think is that I'm sorry this is so hard for you. The second thing I think is that I've never seen you as serious about anybody as you are about him. I've never seen you this interested in anybody except… Immanuel Kant."

"That's true," Maud said. "I've always had a crush on Immanuel Kant."

She noticed only now that he had a new wheelchair, a luxury model. A padded seat and a complicated panel of buttons on the side.

"That's a nice wheelchair," she said. "Looks like it has a lot of options."

"Thank you," he said. "I always wanted you to admire my wheelchair."

"But what if it's just infatuation, and once it burns out I'll look up and realize I don't even like the guy?"

"That could happen. But it never happened with Immanuel Kant, did it?"

"No. That was an infatuation that turned into true love."

"Maybe this one will too."

"I don't know. This is a real person. This involves bodies and mutuality." Mutuality. Who ever uses a word like this in conversation? She felt like a hopeless academic. "It's easy to have a relationship with a dead thinker. But a real live person who…"

"It's true that the fact that you fell head over heels in love with him isn't really a sign that this will last. But… you did fall head over heels in love with him. There's no way you can take that as a bad sign. You're not the type of person who falls in love with people who are bad to you. I think you kind of prefer people who can be good to you."

"I guess I'm an old-fashioned girl in that way."

"What you are," he said, "is a complicated girl with simple needs. You need your books and time to read, and you need a few friends, and you need someone, not to take care of you, but to care for you. If you have all those things, you'll always be all right."

"What's the third thing?"

"The third thing is that I do think you're strong enough to take care of a child. I know you are. I think you'll be a wonderful mother."

"You really think so?"

"I wouldn't have said it if I didn't."

He had a confidence in his voice, a quiet authority, that made her almost believe it.

"So you think I should do it. You think I should have the baby. You think I could live happily ever after with my Arab boyfriend."

He didn't say anything.

"You know, I don't think you've ever told me what I should do," she said.

"I respect you," he said simply. She knew that what he meant was that respecting someone means wanting her to make her own choices.

He worked his wheelchair over to the cabinet. "Would you like some tea? I have every kind of tea there is. Herbal teas, black tea, green tea, chai. Yogi tea. Teas for the hippie, teas for the common man."

He was having trouble moving his wheelchair to the sink, so he turned on the motor, and it got him over there quickly.

She still had trouble believing he needed a wheelchair. It was terrible to see the illness conquering him inch by inch.

"It's not so bad," he said. Sometimes she had the uncanny feeling that they could read each other's minds. "I feel kind of spiffy in this thing."

"Are you working on anything interesting these days?" she said.

Ralph was a restorer of paintings. A difficult, delicate task that was getting more and more difficult for him as his illness progressed. He started to tell her about a painting in the Philadelphia Museum of Art that he had just worked on. He had a very clear way of talking about his work, so that she never got lost in the technicalities, but today she wasn't taking any of it in. She was just admiring him.

It would be terrible to lose him. Even putting personal considerations aside—the consideration that she loved him, as she loved few others—it was sad to think of all this beauty passing from the world.

More than anyone else she knew, he represented, in Maud's mind, a spirit of personal refinement, moral beauty. When his illness was discovered, shortly after they graduated from college, Maud was only half surprised. He had always reminded her of some doomed tubercular poet from the nineteenth century, too delicate to survive.

Even back in college, when most of the people she knew were fucking like monkeys, Ralph had been close to celibate. Inevitably some people thought he was "really" gay, but hadn't admitted it to himself, or secretly gay, but hadn't
come out
of the closet. Maud didn't think that either of these conjectures was true. If he was secretly anything, she'd always thought, he was secretly an angel.

There had been a moment during their sophomore year when she thought they were going to get together, she and Ralph. One afternoon they were sitting in his dorm room listening to music and talking, and then they both fell silent, and suddenly these two people who for the past twelve months had been carrying on a nonstop conversation about everything under the sun had nothing to say. It was as if they hadn't been introduced. Then he had leaned over and kissed her, and she'd thought, It's beginning. The love of my life. But somehow everything was wrong—his lips felt wrong; the way they were touching each other felt wrong—and finally they just lay there, not saying a word, with a feeling of strangeness and defeat, and after a little while she left, and they were awkward with each other for the next few days. Gradually, during the weeks that followed, their friendship returned to its glory, and they had never talked about those ten strange minutes from that day
to this
. Maud didn't think they ever would. She had never understood what happened, and never really regretted it. She loved their friendship; she felt lucky to have a friend like him.