Breakable You (5 page)

Samir had arrived early, mainly because he wanted to leave early. Now it was 7:58, and although they hadn't arranged to meet until 8:00, the fact that he'd been waiting so long made it feel as if she were late. He was on the verge of going home, but then she appeared, rounding the corner, and he had that curious feeling he'd had every time he'd seen her. It was two emotions back-to-back: a jolt of desire and then a jolt of something like rage.

She walked with that peculiar gait that he already found unmistakable, and that he already, in spite of himself, found endearing. She seemed to tip forward, her face preceding the rest of her, as if her balance were thrown off by the weight of all the thoughts in her head.

Although it was still two days away from Halloween, she had to make her way through an army of little goblins before she could get to him. They must have been coming from a school play.

She looked like Venus emerging from a sea of schoolchildren. She seemed like a goddess of intellect and sexuality and playfulness and fertility—all of these qualities at once.

Every time he saw her, he wanted to turn himself off to her, but every time he saw her, something about her overwhelmed his intentions.

For some reason, she saluted him.

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

He didn't know how to react to this.

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

They went into the restaurant. It was crowded, and he found himself annoyed with her, since she'd chosen it. It was a trendy spot, populated by the superficial and the smug. Vapidly glittering women; young men with boxlike heads and lovingly tended hair.

After they sat down, he tried to regroup. He reminded himself of the resolution he'd made that afternoon: to make sure their first date would be their last.

They made small talk while they waited for their drinks. She asked him about his old job. He wished that George and Celia hadn't told her anything about it. It was information about another man, another life.

She seemed a little too interested in his job and why he'd left it. He didn't like being interrogated. She was probably trying to find out if he had abandoned his solidarity with the Arab world. Probably hoping that he had. He considered putting on an act to scare her away—pretending to be a follower of Osama bin Laden, yearning to spill the blood of the Jews—but decided it wouldn't be worth the effort.

When their drinks arrived, he checked his watch. It was 8:20. If he gave this another forty-five minutes, he could leave.

Maud had been showing up at George and Celia's a few times a week and bothering him while he was working. Supposedly she was dropping by to work on her dissertation, but he'd never seen her do any work there. All she did was stand around and try to draw him into conversation. Finally she'd invited him to have dinner with her, and the question had caught him off-guard, and he'd said yes.

If it had been anyone else, he would have said no, but she was so damnably attractive that his circuits had jammed.

He tried not to look at her as he drank his water. He was aware that she was watching him, but he didn't lift his head. She was too good-looking to look at.

"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," he said. "I'm still trying to figure it out."

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

She was angry, obviously. He could understand that. He could respect that.

It had been inconsiderate to say yes to her in the first place. Dishonest. He shouldn't be wasting her time.

"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? I'm just thinking it would be nice if we made it to the soup."

He smiled at this. She seemed like a sweet woman, and he wished that his life had been different. He wished that he'd met her at another time.

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

The soup arrived, and they talked about inconsequential things. She asked him about his work; she called him "Samuel"; he corrected her. She'd been asking him questions since they arrived. Years ago he would have had questions to ask
her
, but now… now, he didn't want to know. The world went on, but his soul no longer went out to meet it.

As they spoke and, for politeness's sake, he pretended to be interested in what she was saying, he was thinking about her body. Her body and the way she wore it.

She seemed to be almost unaware of her body—not unaware, but embarrassed, even ashamed. She could have been intensely foxy if she'd chosen to be, but instead she'd chosen the role of the intellectual, awkward and inward, hunching down to make herself less imposing and hiding her face behind her hair. Every time he'd met her, he'd seen her with a kind of double vision. He couldn't help imagining her as she would be if she took advantage of her statuesqueness and her looks, and he created an imaginary, erotically commanding Maud who stood beside the real Maud, and who sometimes, for fleeting moments, inhabited her, and it was dizzying to consider the possibility that he might be the man who could inspire the two Mauds to come together.

Her attractiveness seemed to make her uneasy, but it wasn't the kind of thing you could hide. She had long legs that she wrapped around each other when she sat—she crossed her legs at the knee and then she tucked one foot behind the shin of the other leg. She probably contorted herself in this fashion out of nervousness, but her legs were so incredibly long that it made her look like some sort of snake goddess: it was a gesture that made her seem both demure and overwhelmingly sexual.

When George and Celia had told him about all her virtues (they placed particular emphasis on how smart she was: "It'll be nice for you to be going out with a woman who's smarter than you are," George had said), he thought that even if she was as special as they said she was, he still didn't want to meet her. He had had enough. And then when she dropped by, he'd been immediately… well, George and Celia had said that he looked smitten, but that wasn't it at all. It wasn't smittenness: he'd been in the deep freeze too long to feel anything as urgent as that. Rather, when he met her, it was as if he heard a faint sound that reminded him of something, something that had left his life so long ago that he could barely remember what it was.

The waitress appeared and asked them a question. He wasn't listening. After she left, Maud said, "It would be nice if just once you could go to a restaurant where the waiters didn't address people as 'You guys.'"

He remembered the way Leila used to complain in restaurants. She was always getting into fights with waiters. "That's the kind of thing my ex-wife used to say. It used to drive her nuts."

"I don't think I've heard you had a wife."

It was stupid of him to have said that. He didn't want to talk about his old life.

"I had a wife."

"It didn't work out?" Maud said.

"If it had worked out I wouldn't be here."

"Why didn't it work out?"

"Things don't always work out in life."

"I know that. But what I meant was, why didn't this particular relationship work out?"

He didn't say anything, just had another sip of his drink.

"Is it a horrible secret?" she said.

"It's not a secret," he said. "But it
is
horrible."

"I'm sorry," she said. "I shouldn't have been so flippant."

"That's all right."

He could feel her giving up. She'd finally gotten the message.

The waitress brought the bill, he paid it, they went out to the Promenade. A brittle wind blew from the river. Manhattan looked broken and hopeless across the way.

They walked for another minute, talking about nothing of importance—something about how she felt about being tall.

From the first, he had found it weirdly exciting that she was taller than he was, but of course he didn't tell her that.

"I should probably get home," she said. "I should do some work on my dissertation."

She was going home. The experiment was over. This was good.

Probably she would avoid him now: she wouldn't visit George and Celia's again while he was working there. He would never have to see her again.

"Well, it was nice to see you," Maud said. "I'm glad we could get together. Arab and Jew. A testament to the fact that people can rise above their ancient prejudices."

She was smiling sarcastically. Her eyes were alive with sharpness, intelligence, wit. He wanted to find out whether George and Celia were right: whether she really was more intelligent than he was. And also, he wanted to kiss her. But that was just a momentary rush of lust, not something he wanted to act on. What he really wanted to do was to go home by himself and never see her again.

"The swarthy Arab and the brainy Jew," he said.

"Brainy but resourceful. Don't forget, we defeated you in battle. Many times."

She said this with a light braggy flirtatious tone, and now besides being sexually electrified by her nearness, he felt something else: some weird shock of powerlessness, partly because she was taller than he was and partly because she spoke to him as if he were the representative of a defeated people. Why on earth did he find this exciting? It was hard to say why, but—

He didn't know what he was doing and then when he knew what he was doing he didn't know why he was doing it, but he moved quickly toward her and kissed her. Then he kissed her again. She wasn't completely returning his kiss but she wasn't moving away from it either.

Is this the way it's starting? Wanting her because I'm angry at her? Wanting her because she makes me feel defeated? What is going on here? In the cold he was working his fingers underneath the layers of her jacket and sweater. She, tentatively, inquisitively, hesitantly, was returning his kiss.

The kiss was interesting, but something else was affecting him more than the kiss. They were pressed against each other, and he could feel each breath she took: long and slow and steady and calm and deep. His own breathing was growing calmer and deeper in response. He felt as if he was receiving some sort of spiritual CPR. He felt bafflingly connected to her. Breath of life.

What is going on here? he thought. What am I doing?

"You look great," Vivian said. This was the second person in two days who had told Eleanor this. Fifty-nine, overweight, out of shape, and perpetually worried about her future, she knew it was unlikely to be true.

She thought she understood why they were saying this. When Eleanor encountered old friends or acquaintances who looked awful, she would sometimes feel guilty about noticing that they looked awful, and, as a way of atoning, she would tell them how good they looked.

"I look great, do I?" Eleanor said. "I look great because I've let myself go to hell?"

"You look great because you don't look like you're trying to please anybody anymore. So you've gained ten pounds. Big deal. You look like yourself now."

Vivian was being kind: it had been more like twenty pounds, even before Eleanor got rid of her scale.

Sometimes she felt like an actress who had put on weight for a role. The role of the abandoned woman.

It was easy for Vivian to tell other people not to worry about their weight. She had been gaunt since girlhood. Eleanor knew this, because they had been friends since fourth grade. They'd both grown up in Portland, and they'd found their way to New York within five years of each other.

Eleanor's doctor had ordered her to start exercising, and, not wanting to jog or ride a stationary bicycle or challenge her coordination on one of those moon machines, she had decided to learn to swim. Vivian had offered to teach her, and now, at seven in the morning, they were in the women's locker room of the 92nd Street Y, getting ready for the first lesson.

Eleanor was changing into a one-piece bathing suit that she had bought the day before. She wished you were allowed to swim in street clothes.

She went gingerly down the steps into the shallow part of the pool. Vivian dived in at the deep end and swam toward Eleanor.

"You're such a coward," Vivian said. "You're not going to
drown
." She splashed a little water toward Eleanor, not to get her wet, just to convey the idea of splashing. "Water is your friend."

Patiently and slowly, Vivian introduced Eleanor to the fundamentals of swimming. First they stood elbow-deep in the water and Vivian showed Eleanor how to use her arms in the dog paddle and the crawl. Then she led Eleanor to the edge of the pool, had her hold on to the lip, and directed her to let her legs float up and start kicking.

"Now you've got the parts," Vivian said. "All you have to do is put them together."

Eleanor had news that she wanted to share with Vivian. Gossip. Although is it gossip if it's about your own life? But she couldn't bring herself to talk about it. It seemed too high-schoolish.
You remember that boy I used to like? I got a phone call from him the other day
… The fact that it was high-schoolish probably shouldn't have been a problem, since she'd known Vivian since long before high school. But it was.

"How are the interviews going?" Eleanor asked. Vivian, who was a historian, was editing an oral history of women in the labor movement.

"It's eerie. The people I'm talking to were once the most vital people of their generation, and to look at them now…There should be something beautiful about old age. But there isn't."

Vivian put her hands on Eleanor's shoulders and turned her around and said, "Now we swim." She showed Eleanor how to push off from the edge of the pool, and she swam beside her as Eleanor kicked frantically. Eleanor was sure she was doing it all wrong. She felt like a child's windup bath toy, inefficiently paddling halfway across the tub before tipping over onto its side and sinking.

She couldn't spare any thought to the question of how to kick more efficiently because she was trying to make sure that she didn't gulp down any of the disgusting chlorinated water. Stroke with your left arm, twist your neck, feel pain, breathe, put your head back in the water, stroke with your right arm—she kept screwing up the rhythm and breathing when her mouth was in the water and then spitting the water out. Somehow she reached the other end of the pool. She clutched the side of the pool to hold herself up. Vivian was beside her, treading water.