Breakable You (8 page)

On the street he had an urge to toss the manuscript into a Dumpster, just because he was exasperated with Ruth. Her illusions, her hopefulness, her woe.

He was irritated with himself for losing control—for saying anything that he actually felt.

After a block or two, he stopped being angry with himself. Nothing about the encounter mattered enough to get upset about. The cardboard box was heavy under his arm. He began to feel half interested in the thing. Adam was going to be spending a few hours in Izzy's company again. He wondered what his old friend had to say.

Maud could see Samir waiting for her near the monkey bars. Sitting on a bench, unaware that he was being observed, he didn't look the way he usually did. He usually looked tense, uncomfortable in his own skin. Now, breaking off a piece of a pretzel and tossing it toward a bird, he just looked sad.

It was a mild Saturday afternoon and Central Park was crowded. She hadn't seen him since they'd had dinner a week earlier. Nothing had come from their odd groping moment on the Promenade: they had made out for a little while and then, as if mutually bewildered, gone their separate ways. She thought she might never hear from him again, but eventually he'd called her and asked if she wanted to spend this Saturday afternoon together.

He didn't notice her until she was standing over him, casting her shadow over his face. He looked up and smiled at her, but with a touch of remoteness, and she could see that as far as he was concerned, they were back at square one. She didn't want to accept that, didn't want to allow things to go backward, so before he had a chance to stand up, she put her hands on his shoulders and kissed him on the mouth. But his kiss was stiff and held-back.

"Hello," he said.

"It's good to see you."

They were planning to go to an outdoor concert. The Singles, a band that she'd read about in
The Village Voice
, were playing that afternoon at the bandshell.

"Which way?" he said.

They began to walk. It was early November but it felt like the height of spring.

The park was filled with families. They had to walk slowly because of the stroller armadas heading in both directions on the path.

Maud was interested in every child they passed, but her closest scrutiny was reserved for the mothers. Trim, athletic, competent mothers, all of whom, doubtless, were also important figures in the worlds of law, entertainment, finance. The warrior-mothers of Manhattan.

Here in stroller heaven, on this warm afternoon, almost all the families they passed looked happy, and Maud experienced a dividedness that was familiar to her. When she was a girl she'd always assumed she'd be a mother someday. But her two trips to the snake pit had made her reconsider. On the female side of her family, there was a strain of… something. Something not quite right. Her mother was unimprovably solid, sane to a fault, but several of the women in the family past had fought losing struggles against a kind of darkness that would probably now be diagnosed as depression, but that had been called madness then. When Maud thought about having children, she worried that she wouldn't be able to hold on to her equilibrium long enough to usher them safely past infancy. She imagined herself sitting in a stunned stupor while her baby howled in its crib.

"Sometimes I feel really happy that my brothers have kids," she said. "They've taken care of the family obligation to bring children into the world. My parents already have all the heirs they need."

She'd said this spontaneously, in the flow of the moment, but it was also true that she'd been planning to mention at some point that she didn't intend to have children. She'd wanted him to know.

Sometimes she dated guys who didn't want children, and it put their minds at rest when she told them that she didn't either; and once in a blue moon she'd dated a guy who
did
want children, and it was only fair to let this kind of guy know that she was one of the rare women who didn't.

She didn't know what Samir made of this information. He didn't say anything.

A man was selling ice cream from a cart, and Maud stopped to buy a Popsicle.

"Seneca wouldn't approve of me," she said to Samir as she tore the wrapper off. "I've been reading him all week and I feel like I'm letting him down."

"You've been letting him down," Samir said. He said this as a flat statement. It was as if he wouldn't even commit himself to asking a question. But she decided to take it as a question.

"He's very severe," she said. "He was the father of Stoicism. I don't know what he'd say about the Popsicle." She started telling him about Seneca. It was easy, because she had been reading him with devotion for years. He wasn't among the two or three philosophers who were closest to her heart, because there was finally something life-denying about his asceticism, but even so, she admired the fierceness, the purity of his thought. The philosophers closest to her heart were those who wrote about how we can find a way to recognize one another, empathize with one another—Kant and Buber and Levinas. But she also needed philosophers like Seneca and Schopenhauer, thinkers with a chillier mission: the mission to remind us all that life ends in nothingness, and that there is no God, no beneficent universe, to confer meaning on our lives from the outside. She needed them to remind her that the meanings we assign to our lives are the only meanings they will finally have.

She didn't want to endure any more awkward silences; she was talking about Seneca just to make some noise. But why was Samir being so withdrawn again? He was the one who'd bolted up at the end of their date last time and launched their make-out session; he was the one who'd called to suggest they get together again. She felt played with. He wasn't even looking at her. He was staring off at a family on a picnic—two kids and two parents, spread out on a blanket. He looked angry.

It was a beautiful warm afternoon, and the park was filled with families. Samir didn't notice the mothers, because he was too attracted to Maud to notice other women. And he didn't look at the children, because it would have hurt too much. So the only people he noticed were the fathers. Fathers pushing strollers; fathers wearing Snuglis; fathers leading children by the hand. Young fathers, distracted, because they had so much raw animal life in them that they couldn't give themselves over to the task of caring for their young. Older fathers: bearded, balding, considerate, attentive, somewhat emasculated midlife dads.

Samir wanted to kill them all. He wanted to tear their scraggly little beards off, punch their teeth in, put his index fingers in their eyes and watch the retinal jelly pop out like pus.

Maud was talking about philosophy, in the study of which she was absolutely and touchingly absorbed. He didn't know if he'd ever met anyone this pure, didn't know if he'd ever met anyone who lived more genuinely for ideas than she did. Even in their brief and limited and strange acquaintance, he had found this clear.

Pure-minded woman.

But what was the point of being here with her?

"On the other hand," she said, "maybe Seneca himself enjoyed a Popsicle from time to time. In secret."

"Do you think so?"

"I wouldn't put it past him. He was always preaching indifference to worldly pleasures and worldly success, but when you read his biography it turns out that he did everything he could to ingratiate himself with whoever was ruling Rome at the time. He wanted to be with the in-crowd."

"So he was just another hypocrite."

"Yes," she said. "Probably. And some people conclude that that makes his ideas worthless. But I'm not sure. Does that really mean there's something wrong about the ideas themselves? Maybe an idea can be true and useful even if the person who thought of it can't quite put it into practice."

A group of about twenty children, flanked by two beleaguered grown-ups, was converging on the ice-cream cart.

If he were an honest man he would simply walk away. She claimed she didn't want children, but he didn't believe it. He knew that she did want children. She had to. She was a life-giver, a life-giver down to her bones; he could feel that. And so he was sure that he knew what she wanted, even if she herself didn't know it yet.

If he were an honest man he'd walk away, because he had nothing to give her. She was drawn to him because of an illusion. If she could see him as he really was, she would find that he was not a human being at all. He was just a construction, a thing that kept itself going by means of little contraptions: he had a motor in his throat that started turning when he needed to talk; he had several tiny men working machines inside him to make sure that he smiled when he was supposed to smile; he retained the muscle memory to do his carpentry; but it was all shit, and he wasn't sure how anyone ever could miss it, could miss the obvious fact that he was through.

As he looked at the children clustered around the ice-cream cart, all he could think was Zahra, Zahra, Zahra. None of them was Zahra. None of them was his dear one. None of them was his child.

The park was horrible. He needed to get away from all these
people
. Especially these children, but everyone else as well. He changed direction and led her toward a wooded part of the park.

"I think this is called the Ramble," Maud said. "It's about the only part of the park where a person can get lost. I remember once wandering in here as a kid and not being able to find my way out. I was terrified."

But even from here you could hear them, you could hear the children's voices. It was no good.

He turned to Maud and touched her arm. It was the first time he had touched her since he'd mashed up against her on the Promenade.

"I have to go," he said. "I apologize for everything. You seem like a special person, but I really have to go."

Okay. Get lost
. This was the first thing she thought of saying, because she was sick of this, this doomed effort to woo him. But she didn't say it, because she didn't want him to go.

Don't go. Please.

This was the second thing she thought of saying, because despite the ample evidence that he had barricaded himself off from human contact, she was weirdly and irrevocably drawn to him. But she didn't say it, because it would have sounded weak. She had no interest in pleading.

You're not going anywhere.

That was the third thing she thought of saying. And this is what she said.

"You're not going anywhere. You know that."

She moved closer to him. She was looking down at him.

He was the first man she'd ever been with whom she
could
look down at, and it filled her with a sense of her own power.

She had always been attracted to tall men. So this was something new. Samir was half a head shorter than she was, and she felt obscurely that the disparity in size was part of the attraction here, part of the mutual attraction, part of why he couldn't quite walk away from her, part of a charm that she could figure out how to work.

He looked puzzled. But he wasn't walking away. He was waiting for her to do something. He was waiting for what would come next.

What
would
come next? It was up to her.

She felt the way you do when you've got a key that doesn't fit perfectly in the lock, but you know that if you play around with it a little, the lock will turn.

"I have something to show you." She took his hand and led him farther into the untended part of the park, thick with high wild hedges. The path was faint and unpaved.

She was anxious. The Ramble, she was remembering now, used to be well known as a place to avoid. Prostitutes, transsexual prostitutes, gay men grimly humping. Here under the trees the light was nearly gone.

She found a little clearing that was hidden from view behind a circle of tall bushes. Still holding his hand, she squeezed through a space between the bushes and pulled him after her.

She put her hand on his chest and pushed him back a step, so that he was backed up against a thin young tree. She put her other hand on his belt and undid it. He still had a look of puzzlement, but he wasn't stopping her.

"You never had any intention of leaving," she said. She undid the two lower buttons of his shirt and kneeled and kissed his stomach, which was a good stomach, not too trim—he didn't have "washboard abs," which, to her, would have signaled mostly vanity—but not too paunchy, and then she pulled his zipper down and was pleased to see that he was hard. She licked the tip of the thing, slowly, and then looked up at him.

"You
do
want to be with me," she said. "I thought so."

She felt like some femme fatale from an old movie—Greta Garbo as Mata Hari, although in an X-rated version—which was wildly new to her. She had always felt that her sexual life was unoriginal, uncreative—wholly missionary and
bien pensant
—and it was exciting to find herself sinking so effortlessly into a different role.

She took his penis into her mouth and he leaned back against the tree and closed his eyes.

The blow job, for Maud, had always been problematic, an engenderer of mixed feelings. On the one hand there was something disgusting about it: the ignorant penis, always weird-looking when observed from up close, sporting too many pimplelike things and inexplicable purple patches, smelling pungent and unwashed—a blow job is a man's idea of heaven, but it rarely occurs to a man that a woman might have more interest in putting his penis in her mouth if it was
clean
—and then of course if he comes in your mouth, although it doesn't always taste awful, it never exactly tastes good. It's never as nice as a milk shake.
I could give you that blow job you asked for, but I'd much rather have a milk shake
. But on the other hand there was something she loved about having a man in her mouth like this: his helplessness, the way he falls into a kind of trance when you go down on him. And she also loved the complexity of it. Giving a blow job always made her feel like a supplicant, as if she were unworthy of meeting the man face-to-face, but it also made her feel powerful, because of the hint of primal danger, the fact that you could bite the damned thing off if you felt like it, ridding the world of a penis. Maybe the thing she liked about blow jobs, after all, the reason she continued to give them, was that both participants, the woman and the man, were at each other's mercy.