Breakable You (6 page)

"I think you should know that I'm feeling this urge to drown you," Vivian said.

Without her glasses, Vivian did look a little frightening. She had tight, sinewy, strappy muscles, and a face that was hardened and almost brutal—a face that might have been chiseled by a sculptor who had fallen out of love with the idea of beauty.

Her face expressed her warriorlike will to mask herself, to efface all traces of the defenseless creature she felt herself to be.

For decades, the two of them had been making the opposite choices. Vivian didn't have children, and she'd never had a serious relationship. In order to concentrate on reading, writing, and thinking, she had refused everything else. A long time ago, there had been a man, and sometime after that there had been a woman, but the pull of neither had been strong enough to distract her for long from her single-minded dedication to her calling.

Eleanor admired her friend, but she sometimes thought that she had sacrificed too much. Of course, Vivian probably thought the same thing about her.

For Vivian, the important question about people was what they had done with their professional lives. She seemed to regard raising children as a sort of hobby, not an endeavor substantial enough to deflect a serious person from the duty to make a contribution in the wider world.

Eleanor's contribution had been limited. When she was young she'd had a clear idea
of
her future: she was going to be a writer and a psychologist. She imagined herself writing novels, short stories, and books about psychology—not textbooks, but case studies, informed by a fiction writer's eye. She met Adam just after she got her BA in psychology, and within six months of meeting him, she was pregnant with Carl. During the first few months of her pregnancy, she looked for a job, but in her third trimester, her doctor put her on bed rest, and she stopped thinking about the work world, and didn't begin to think about it again until many years later, after Maud was born. Eleanor went back to school, got her master's degree in psychology—feeling like Rip Van Winkle because of the way the intellectual landscape of the profession had changed—and set up a private practice. She wasn't yet forty at the time, but she felt perpetually haunted by a sense of belatedness: she was getting started so much later than she'd planned.

She never did return to writing. Trying to pursue a career as a psychologist while taking care of three children was almost more than she could do. She never stopped hoping that she might find a way to turn some of her energies to writing someday, but she had to place the hope into a sort of dream-deferment plan, where it had remained for almost forty years.

She had never stopped
thinking
about writing. It often struck her as unbelievable that she hadn't become a writer after all; it was as if she were living the wrong life. But as Adam, slow and steady and unstoppable, had become more and more of a success, her own dreams of being a writer had started to seem childish. She had wanted to be a writer long before she had ever met him, but at some point during their marriage she had convinced herself that if she ever did get back to writing, everyone would think that she was pathetically trying to imitate her husband.

When you can't have the life you'd hoped for, the great test of character is what you make of the life you have. The thing she could be proud of was that she'd given herself fully to her life. She hadn't diminished herself by making the mistake that some of her friends had made: unable to live the lives they'd dreamed of, they had ended up stuck in a ghostly limbo, failing to commit themselves to the lives they actually had.

For a few minutes they didn't speak, as Vivian tried to help Eleanor learn to float. Floating was harder than making your way across the pool. Vivian gently supported her with her hands while Eleanor lay on the water, feeling tragically heavy, a paralyzed porpoise, doomed to go down.

"You can do this," Vivian said. "All you have to do is relax. All you have to do is stop
trying."

Eleanor was aware that this lesson had a conclusion that was foreordained, just as it is foreordained that a romantic comedy will conclude with a marriage. The conclusion was that Eleanor would learn to float, and it would be not only a swimming lesson but a lesson about life. It would be a lesson about letting go (you learn to float only after you've stopped trying) and a lesson about feminist renewal (older woman conquers fears, learns something new).

She was lying in the water with her eyes closed, and Vivian was holding her up gently, one hand on her back and the other under her knees, and Eleanor visualized the beautiful outcome: Vivian, without letting her know it, would remove her hands, and Eleanor would realize only after a minute or two that she was floating on her own, and the realization would blossom into a kind of spiritual awakening, and she would lie in ease and comfort on the water, a woman reborn.

Unfortunately, her body wouldn't cooperate. Every time Vivian let go, Eleanor started sinking.

"Maybe some people weren't meant to learn to swim," Eleanor said.

"That's possible," Vivian said.

After they dressed, they had breakfast in a coffee shop on Lexington Avenue. Eleanor still didn't know whether she wanted to share the thing that she was thinking about, but Vivian had known her too long for her to be able to conceal it.

"You look like you have something to say," Vivian said.

"I do. I have news."

"So what is it?"

"I'm not sure this is a good time to talk about it. I don't think we have time to discuss the ramifications," Eleanor said. It was almost nine, and both of them had to be at work soon.

"You can't tell me you have news and then not tell me what it is."

"I guess that's true," Eleanor said, relieved. "Okay. I got a phone message from Patrick."

"Patrick?" Vivian said.

"Patrick."

"
Patrick Patrick
?" Vivian said.

Eleanor didn't say anything, because she didn't want to keep saying the name Patrick anymore.

"Did he hear you're getting divorced? What did he say? What did
you
say? How
is
he?"

"I don't know. He just left a message. I haven't called him back."

A familiar expression came over Vivian's face, an exasperated-with-her-old-friend look.

"When are you going to?"

"I'm not sure."

"
Are
you going to?"

"I'm not sure."

"
Why
haven't you called him? Don't tell me: you're not sure."

Eleanor didn't speak.

Vivian drummed her fingers on the table, trying, evidently, to think of a question that might yield a different answer.

"What harm could there be in calling him back?" Vivian said. "Don't answer that. Ellie: listen to me. You could turn out to be the love of each other's life. Or, you could have an awkward fifteen-minute conversation and never talk to each other again. In either case, what can you lose?"

"I don't know," Eleanor said. "I don't know what I could lose."

And yet she had the feeling that she could lose something.

"I wonder what he's like now," Vivian said. "I haven't thought about him in about twenty years."

"I've thought about him a lot," Eleanor said.

We love some people because of what we see in them; we love others because of what they help us see in ourselves. Patrick was the only person Eleanor had loved for both reasons. He was not a man who would have impressed you if you saw him on the street or met him at a party. But when she was with him, the world seemed calmer; the world seemed to make more sense. And when she was with him, she felt—well, she had never been able to decide whether she had felt more
than
herself or more
like
herself.

In many ways it had been an unlikely romance. Patrick, when she had last seen him, nearly forty years ago, was well on the way to becoming a labor-union bureaucrat. He represented the third generation of a family of die-hard trade unionists; he was the first member of his family to go to college. He was an idealist, but he was also tenaciously practical and tough as nails. She, at the time, thought of herself as a free spirit, an anarchist, an artist. She wasn't any of these things anymore. She wondered if Patrick had changed as much as she had.

"You
have
to call him back," Vivian said. "If not for yourself, you should do it for me. It would be the most romantic story I've ever heard in my life. He could be your true love."

Someone who didn't know Vivian very well might have thought it odd to hear her talk about romance in this way. But it wasn't. Beneath the cowl of her cynicism, Vivian was a thorough romantic. She was alone in life not because she didn't believe in true love, but because she did.

Eleanor didn't want to believe that Patrick might be her true love, because if that was so, it made the rest of her life one long mistake.

"It's better to let him remain a memory. What if he's become a Republican? I don't think I could handle that."

"Labor organizers don't become Republicans," Vivian said. "You have to call him."

"What if he's become a drunk? Don't tell me labor organizers don't become drunks."

"You have to call him."

When she thought of calling him, she felt excited. But she was troubled that it excited her as much as this. She hadn't felt this kind of nervous anticipation about anything in a long time, and it disturbed her that the feeling didn't concern her own work, didn't concern any effort of her own toward self-creation, but instead concerned the pie-in-the-sky possibility of getting together with a boyfriend from almost forty years ago. "Well, I don't know," Eleanor said. "We'll see."

Adam didn't object to the idea that his dead were calling out . to him. What he objected to was the idea that they were calling out for him to join them.

He was in the lobby of the building where Izzy Cantor had lived with his wife, Ruth, during the last twenty-five years of his life. It was a brown brick prewar building just off Broadway. The lobby smelled of Jewishness and time.

He was happy to have escaped from all this—from this Upper West Side world, the world of the fathers, the world of late-night conversations about Marx and Freud in homey little delicatessens of dubious cleanliness, the world that had seemed to be his destined burial ground. He took the elevator to the fifteenth floor.

It required a full minute for Ruth to open her door: she had to turn three locks and then slide the chain away. When she finally got it open, he was taken aback by how badly she'd deteriorated. Her skin was an unhealthy blue, like a slice of ham that had been left too long in the refrigerator and had aged oddly. She seemed to have shrunk by a foot. And she had let herself go. When they were younger, Ruth had always reached for elegance; now she was in an old gray bathrobe and slippers.

Adam wasn't sure how long it had been since he'd seen her. Could it have been two years?

Izzy had been seven or eight years older than Adam, and Ruth in turn had been four or five years older than Izzy. Adam couldn't remember anyone's age. When he'd first met Ruth, she'd seemed the archetype of the desirable older woman—mysterious, alluring, possessed of secret lore. She'd lived on a kibbutz in Israel in the late 1950s and for years had retained or affected a slight accent, and although from his current vantage point Adam could imagine few things less appealing than life on a kibbutz—men hectoring women about fine points of socialist ideology; women muscular and without makeup; children running around filthy and snot-nosed because no one person in particular was responsible for keeping any of them clean; and meetings, meetings, meetings—at the time it had lent her an exotic air.

"How are you, Ruthie? You look wonderful."

"How am I? Everything hurts." She smiled and touched him on the arm. "I'm glad you could come."

"Of course. I'm only sorry I couldn't come earlier." I'm only sorry I never changed my phone number.

She led him down the long cramped hall. The bookcases that lined it were crowded with books that hadn't quite outlived their time.
The Rise of David Levinsky. Jews Without Money. Summer in Williamsburg. The Unpossessed
. Sometimes Adam would come across a cluster of books like this at a used-book sale, and he would know for sure that another old Jewish leftist had died.

He himself had staged a bonfire at the end of the century. In a rented cabin in Maine he had burned his papers, and soon after that he'd given most of his old books away to a public library. He'd rid himself of the things that had marked him as a member of a dying generation.

It was an enormous apartment, though Izzy had never made a dime. The story of literary New York, Adam thought, was the story of rent control. But all that was over now.

"Will you excuse me for a minute?" Ruth said. "I didn't forget you were coming, but I lost track of the time. I just want to freshen up."

She left him alone in the den.

The smell of the place carried overwhelming evidence of her sadness. A smell composed of many different things: microscopic flakes of skin from a lonely, aged body; dust mites accumulated over several decades; the troubling traceless scent given off by someone who has long been sexually deprived; and the faint scent of cat urine, lingering throughout the apartment even though Lionel, Izzy and Ruth's cat, had died almost a decade ago, just after Izzy died.

But now that she was out of the room, he felt more at home. He wondered how many hours he'd spent in this room with Izzy, bullshitting about politics or gossiping or talking about books. Talking about books, mostly. Adam, now, had reached an age at which he didn't give a damn about literature: writing was a trade to him like any other. But Izzy had never lost the radiant-hearted exuberance of his youth.

When Ruth reappeared he saw that she had made a heroic effort to pull herself together. She wore a white cotton blouse and a long skirt. She was still reaching toward elegance, it seemed.

"You must be wondering why I've been so persistent. I think I must have called you about five times."