Breakable You (36 page)

"What world are you living in, Bub?" She said this softly, affectionately, and lightly made a fist and hit him on his chest.

It couldn't be worry-free. She knew that. But it might be the last chance she would ever have for love, grown-up love. She wasn't sure that she and Adam had ever really experienced it together. It would be a terrible fate to grow old and die without ever having experienced it. But loving a man was not the task before her.

"Can we just sit here like this for a while?" she said.

"Of course."

They sat together without speaking. She closed her eyes.

He was running his hand through her hair. My white and gray and brittle hair, she thought.

"How's your daughter?" he said. "I haven't even asked you how she's doing."

She wasn't sure she wanted to talk about it, but she couldn't think of a graceful way to evade it. So she told him about Maud. He hadn't even known she was in the hospital.

After she said something about how close Maud was to getting her Ph.D., Patrick asked a question about it, and she realized that he didn't know what subject Maud was studying.

"We don't really know each other very well yet, do we?" she said.

Eleanor told him more about Maud, and then she talked a little bit about Carl and Josh, and Patrick talked about his daughters, and soon the two of them had moved on to the subject of their marriages, speaking with more ease than they had in all these past months. For a moment she thought the evening might flow back toward the physical—she thought he might kiss her again. But he didn't, and she decided it was better that way.

She left the hotel at about two in the morning. Patrick asked her to stay, but she wanted the comfort of her own bed.

Sometimes, when she was in a doctor's office, she would look at women's magazines and read articles about how your sex life can be hotter in your sixties than it ever was before. She wasn't sure she believed it, and even if she could believe it, she wasn't sure she wanted a sex life anymore.

When she got back to her apartment, she walked from room to room, turning on all the lights. She was glad to be home. It was a relief not to have to think about her body anymore. When she was on the couch with Patrick, trying to have a sex life, her body was a terrible thing, a piñata, fit for nothing more than to be whacked with sticks.

But with no gifts inside. A piñata filled with pus.

Now, when she was alone, her body didn't seem like too much of a misfortune. As ramshackle a structure as it was, it was home.

She was tired, but she couldn't sleep. She wondered how Maud was doing, but it was too late to call.

She sat at the desk in Maud's old room and opened her notebook. As late as it was, she thought she would spend an hour or two in the blessed silence, trying to write.

For the last year, the thought that she was going to get together with Patrick had made her life seem rich with possibility. The other thing that had made her feel like this, that had given her a desire for the future, was that after decades of dreaming about it, she had finally begun to write. So it seemed important to write for an hour or two, to reaffirm her belief that her life had promise.

She sat there for a long time, but the words wouldn't come.

The other day, she had been in the middle of a chapter about the Thanksgiving before her sister died. She tried to keep going, but nothing came. Her sister, her mother, and her father had left the room. All she could think about was Maud.

The notebooks she had filled during the past months were stacked in a box next to the desk.

She knew it was a mistake to try to take stock of her life at four in the morning, but she took the notebooks out of the box and looked through them slowly. After she was finished, it was hard to restrain herself from dropping them in the trash.

For months she had felt as if she was finally embarking on a project that she had dreamed about when she was a girl, a project that she'd secretly persisted in considering her true life's calling. Although she'd begun so late, and might be haunted by a sense of belatedness for the rest of her life, during these months she'd at least had the satisfaction of feeling as if she had well and truly begun. But now it seemed obvious that if she'd actually thought that her writing had amounted to anything more than glorified journal-keeping, she must have been in a state of temporary derangement. It was as if she'd drunk a potion when Adam left her, an elixir of self-delusion, in order to survive being alone.

She wasn't a woman in love. She wasn't a writer. She wasn't a woman in the process of "reinventing" herself. She was a mother. If she was anything more than that, she couldn't remember what it might be.

The trip to Zabar's was a pain in the ass. He made the mistake of going in the late afternoon, and it was jam-packed with nerdy-looking Upper West Siders. He looked for things that Maud might like, but who the hell knew what Maud might like? He bought some tofu spread, because he knew she used to like it, and some lobster salad, because he liked it himself. He knew that Maud was a vegetarian, but he was pretty sure she still ate fish.

He hadn't told Maud he was coming. He wanted to surprise her. He would show up with a tasty lunch and a printout of the last week of discussions from her philosophy group.

The checkout line was very long, and he had the additional misfortune of being behind a quartet of Upper West Side phonies who had just gone jogging. Two men and two women in early middle age. The women had frizzy hair and slack but curiously unlined faces; it was clear from a glance that they listened to NPR, subscribed to
The Nation
, and hoped that Hillary Clinton would run for president. The men, gangly testosterone-deprived men of the Upper West Side, with their foolish too-short running shorts and their pale white legs and their feminized bodies, were doing prissily elaborate stretches as they stood in line, rotating their heads as if working out cricks in their necks.

This, Adam thought, was how you could always spot an Upper West Side phony: sooner or later you'll see him rotating his head in a full circle, trying to loosen up his neck or upper back. Professors and social workers doing half-assed imitations of ballet dancers.

He flagged down a taxi on Broadway.

He was still in a state of shock. Every third woman on the street seemed to be Thea, except that none of them had her fire.

Perhaps the worst thing about it was how it had undermined his faith in his understanding of human nature. He had thought that the success of his new novel would buy him at least another year or two with Thea.

He had been invited to a party that night. A publication party for some hot young British novelist, it was being held at Elaine's. He'd decided to visit his daughter instead. He hoped he'd made this choice purely out of love for his daughter, not because Thea's departure had left him feeling too defeated to show his face.

The cab emerged from the Midtown Tunnel. Queens is one of those places that makes you suspect that humanity has an ugliness instinct, an innate drive to live amid hideous surroundings.

His cell phone rang.

"Adam."

"Yes?"

"This is Jeffrey. Jeffrey Lipkin."

"Hello, Jeffrey."

So this was it. He was at a fork in the road of time. Two future universes lay before him: one in which he was disgraced, a plagiarist and a fraud, another in which he remained a distinguished man. In a moment, one of those universes would flicker out and die.

"I'm writing about you. You and your new book."

An expose? It was impossible to tell from his tone.

"I have to tell you," Jeffrey said, "that I think this is a work of genius. It goes far beyond anything you've ever done before. You've put it all together here. The lyricism and the precision. I know you don't like being compared to your friend Izzy Cantor, but, honestly, I think you've taken things that he began and taken them much further."

"Thank you, Jeffrey. Your opinion means a lot to me."

"No. Thank
you
."

He wanted to ask about the article—what? where?—but it was better to appear above such things.

"I'm really stunned," Jeffrey said. "How many writers do their best work in their sixties? Philip Roth? Yeats? Henry James, maybe? I can't think of anybody else. And now there's you."

And now there's me, Adam thought. With a little help from my friends.

"Anyway," Jeffrey said, "I just wanted to thank you again. To watch an established artist taking the kind of risks you've taken in this book. Mining your material more deeply than you've ever done before. Risking a kind of emotional openness you've never risked before. Writing in a more lyrical style… it's all just amazing. So thank you. Really. Thank you."

And that was that.

It was over. It was done. If Jeffrey didn't see it, no one would.

Adam was free.

He had a moment of sadness for Izzy. Not even your truest and most loyal reader could recognize your literary fingerprint. I'm sorry, my old friend. Not even your most ardent admirer could save you.

The moment passed. He wanted to celebrate.

But here he was, outside a psychiatric institution in Queens.

He paid the cabbie and got out of the cab and went in. The person at the desk told him that visiting hours would not resume for another fifteen minutes. He could have talked his way in again, but he decided that today he wouldn't mind waiting. The reason was that the attractive young woman he'd noticed the day before—she was visiting the shell-shocked patient when he was visiting Maud—was here, in the waiting room, reading
The New Yorker
. It wouldn't be unpleasant to sit near her for a little while.

She looked comfortable with herself. She had an air of self-sufficiency and calm. As before, she was dressed in a simple, subtle, unadorned way, no jewelry except for her earrings, no makeup. He was sure that if he could get close enough to smell her he'd find that she was wearing no perfume either. But there wasn't a hint of self-denial about any of this. She was one of those women who was free of vanity because she could afford to be. Men would be drawn to her whether she did anything to enhance her appearance or not.

She finished her article, looked up, smiled. She had probably been waiting here for a while. She looked as if she'd be happy to talk.

"Do you work here?" Adam said. Obviously she didn't; it was just something to say.

"No. I'm a therapist, but I'm not associated with Holliswood. My aunt is a patient here."

"Do you think this is a good place?" he said.

"Yes. It's better than most."

"Are there still fashions in psychiatric institutions? Years ago everyone who was anyone spent a week or two at Payne Whitney. I'm not sure the treatment was particularly good, but if you needed to be institutionalized, you went there, because it was the place to see and be seen."

"I think I read that Marilyn Monroe spent time there."

"Marilyn Monroe. That's right. A lot of writers went there too. It was one of the few places where writers could mix with movie stars on equal terms. Robert Lowell. James Schuyler. Not that those names would mean anything to anyone your age."

"I'm not as young as you think I am. And I love Robert Lowell."

"A psychologist who reads poetry. Will wonders never cease." He thought of Ellie as he said this. He was being unfair to her—she'd always read much more poetry than he had—but he didn't care.

"If a psychologist wants to read poetry," she said, "those are the poets to read. That whole generation of American poets was interested in the line between sanity and madness. Lowell, Roethke, Plath, Anne Sexton. Allen Ginsberg."

"Allen never ended up in Payne Whitney, though. He wanted to be a man of the people. Only public hospitals for Allen."

Her expression was one of smiling suspiciousness. "You're a writer yourself, aren't you?"

"I've been known to scribble a line or two."

"I
thought
I recognized you. Are you Adam Weller?"

He nodded modestly, trying not to show how pleased he was to be recognized. It didn't happen often—perhaps once or twice a year.

"I read you all through college. I really couldn't stand your books. I hated the first one, and despised the second one, and was morally offended by the third. And I disliked them even more when I reread them." She said all of this with a sly, flirtatious smile. "I was reading a lot of feminist literary criticism, and you were one of the enemies."

It was like the moment when the cherries fall into place on the slot machine and everything starts ringing and flashing. He was certain that he could take this woman home if he wished to. He didn't wish to: after thirty-five years with Ellie, a love affair with another psychologist was the last thing he needed. But it was exhilarating to know that he could.

"Are you still the unreconstructed sexist that my women's-studies teacher said you were in 1992?"

"My prejudices aren't that specific anymore. At this point I'm just a misanthrope."

A moment later, the attendant emerged to tell them that visiting hours had begun.

The scentless beauty extended her hand to Adam and said, "Very nice
to
meet you." She went through the double doors and was gone.

Adam stood in the waiting room holding the Zabar's bag.

The phone call from Lipkin had elated him. And the conversation with the psychologist, as brief as it was, had dispelled his fear that he might be too old to attract anyone else like Thea. There were many young women out there who, through some mixture of ambition and father-fixation, would be happy to be seen on his arm.

As recently as last night, as recently as this afternoon, he'd thought that he would visit Maud here every day. Now he reconsidered. She had to be here, for now, because she was serving a temporary sentence in the community of the bent and the broken, but there was no reason he had to visit. Maud would either triumph over her troubles or be defeated by them, but in either case the outcome would have nothing to do with how often he saw her.