Breakable You (11 page)

Eleanor didn't feel sure about what would become of Jenny and Nick. She had a hunch that they would keep going, and that things would get better between them. Nick, from Jenny's account, seemed genuinely to want to grow, and to grow within the relationship. Eleanor's impression was that he was just as Jenny had described him: a good man who had behaved badly. But Eleanor wouldn't say this. She didn't want to give advice, and if she said it, it would be a piece of advice masquerading as a description.

There were about two minutes left in their session.

"There's one thing that scares me, though," Jenny said. "We still have sex once in a while, you know, and I keep getting this urge to throw my diaphragm away. Like, put it in, but then go to the bathroom and take it out again. Not because I want to have a baby right now. I think it would be terrible to be pregnant again when I'm not even sure I want to stay with him. But I keep having this strange impulse to do what I can to get pregnant. It's almost like I want to punish him. Or test him."

"Have you actually done it?" Eleanor said. "Taken the diaphragm out?"

"Just once."

Eleanor didn't know precisely why Jenny would want to do something that had such a high probability of leading to more misery for herself, but it didn't surprise her. It's what we all do, she thought.

She wanted to say:
Don't do it. Don't blow it. Don't fuck up your life
. But, for better or for worse, she didn't.

Clients often wait until the end of their session to come out with the things that most deeply disturb them. It was hard to know why. Was it simply because the things that were hard to say always came last? Or was there some sort of test involved—were they testing their therapists to see if they'd relax their boundaries and let the session go on?

Eleanor never relaxed her boundaries. She looked at the clock and said, "It's time," and stood up.

After Jenny left, Eleanor spent a few minutes drawing together her thoughts. She tried to do this after every session. Jenny, from the beginning, had posed a particular challenge. Eleanor had to monitor herself constantly to make sure she wasn't reading her own life into Jenny's. It would be so easy to superimpose Adam's features over Nick's, and to start rooting for Jenny to leave him, as she herself should have left Adam years ago. And it wouldn't be hard to go the other way and idealize Nick, to see him as a man who had made one mistake and was prepared to pay for it—to imagine him, yes, as a flawed man, but, in contrast to Adam, a flawed man who was in love with his wife. Her job, part of her job, was to help Jenny paint her own picture of her own life, not to paint one for her.

She put Telemann's Trio in E Minor in the CD player. At the end of the day she liked to listen to something by Telemann or Mozart or Vivaldi or Bach, something to remind her of the possibility of happiness. Freud had famously told a prospective client that he couldn't say that psychoanalysis would make her happy; all he was offering her was the chance to exchange her present misery for an ordinary unhappiness. Given the human condition, he thought, one could hope for nothing more than that. Eleanor thought he was right. But it was good to be reminded of the
idea
of happiness.

After half an hour, she gathered up her things and started out for home. Her apartment was only fifteen blocks away from her office. It was nice to walk in the coppery light of the autumn afternoon.

This was the round of her life now, ever since Adam had moved out. During the day, people came to her and she listened to them, wondering, all the while, whether she was listening well enough, creatively enough, intelligently enough, responsively enough. And at night she tried to listen to herself. She would come home to an apartment that was too large for her, have dinner and a drink, open her notebook, and resume the effort to understand her own past and to make out the shape of her future.

During the walk she stopped at a grocery and picked up a chicken breast and some asparagus, intending to cook herself dinner, but when she got home she abandoned the plan. This happened pretty much every night. She would briefly think about transforming herself into a "strong, proud woman living alone," the kind that her friend Vivian would approve of, and making a meal for herself always seemed like a necessary first step. But then she would decide she was too tired, and she'd pick up the phone and order Chinese food, which was one reason she had gained so much weight over the past year.

After deciding to have some food delivered, she would always tell herself that she was going to read while she ate. But when the food came, she would still feel tired, too tired for the exertion of reading, and she would eat her broccoli with garlic sauce in front of the TV.

After turning on the TV, she usually tried to remain respectable by watching
The NewsHour
on PBS, but after ten minutes she would inevitably switch to a rerun of
Friends
or
Law & Order
. Tonight she watched
Law & Order
for half an hour, wondering idly, as she always did, whether Sam Waterston was unattached.

She cleaned up the kitchen, turned off the TV, and finally managed to drag herself into Maud's room and start writing. She started by describing her sessions with the clients she'd seen that day, and somehow this led her to return to the subject of what it had been like to see Adam. Writing randomly, directionlessly—just trying to keep her pen moving across the page for a few more minutes—she found herself writing about the day she met Adam, in 1966. Thirty-seven years ago. She thought it might be interesting to write down everything she could remember about that day.

She was still writing when the phone rang. Through caller ID, which still seemed like magic to her, she knew who it was. It was Patrick.

She didn't answer. She wanted to talk to him, but she didn't want to talk to him now. She wanted to wait until she was feeling stronger, more whole.

The phone stopped ringing. He didn't leave a message. A minute later it rang again. It was him again.

There never is a right time, of course. It wasn't as if she could wait for a time when she'd feel whole again. That time would never come.

She picked up the phone.

"Hello, Patrick."

There was a pause, as he took a moment to understand how she knew who was calling.

"It's really you," he said.

"It's really me. More or less."

There was a silence.

One of the things she remembered now about Patrick was that he wasn't a talker. She who believed in the talking cure had been in love with a man who never talked.

"How are you, Ellie?" he finally said.

"That's a big question to answer after thirty-seven years."

"I guess it is."

"Are you still a union guy?"

"Still a union guy. Are you still a writer?"

"No." It made her sad to say no. Made her feel as if she'd let him down.

"How's Adam?"

She didn't know if she wanted to tell him that she and Adam weren't together anymore. It was presumptuous, she knew, for her to feel sure that Patrick was reaching out to her in more than just a friendly way, yet she did feel sure. Telling him about Adam would be like opening the door to him, and she didn't know if she wanted to open the door. What she and Patrick had had was so far back in the past that they weren't even quite the same people anymore. At least she wasn't quite the same.

She didn't know if she had the strength to heave her heaviness—her bulky body and her bulky soul—into the effort to begin a new life.
Now it is autumn and the falling fruit
…

"Adam is doing well. At least he seems to be. We separated a year ago."

"I'm sorry," he said, but she knew he wasn't.

"Are you still with Diana?"

"Yes. We're still together. Sort of. It's a long story."

She was disappointed.

"I'm happy to hear from you, Patrick," she said, "and I'm also curious about why you're calling me now. What's going on?"

"My daughter's going to NYU. My older daughter. She's a freshman. I'm going to be visiting her soon. I thought that if I was in New York, maybe we could finally have that cup of hot chocolate. It'd be a little late, but…"

She wasn't sure she wanted to see him. More precisely, she wasn't sure she wanted to be seen. Patrick was surely imagining her as the reedy soft-souled girl she'd been at twenty-two. She didn't know if she wanted him to see her as she was, round and saggy. A human beanbag.

A picture of what it would be like to see him flashed across her mind. She saw him waiting on some street corner, smiling and eager, and, then, on first catching sight of her, looking stunned, and struggling to hide his disappointment.

Of course he would try to take account of the years—try to draw a mental portrait of her, like one of those computer images produced by the police, depicting the likely appearance of a suspect who hasn't been photographed in decades. But she was sure he'd be getting it wrong. There was no way he could imagine her as the ruin that she was, the testament to the power of gravity, with a face that was all wrong: wrinkled in the places where she once was soft, soft in the places where a woman who had lived her life right, a woman who had done more to define herself, would be sharply chiseled.

He told her when he was going to be in the city. She felt a panicky wish to get off the phone.

"I might have to be away then. There's a conference." She didn't care whether she sounded plausible.

"Well, maybe I can call you when we get a little closer to the date."

"That sounds good. Look. I have to go. I have a call coming in." A lie: she didn't even have call-waiting. "It's good to hear from you, Patrick, but I need to go."

He said good-bye, and she said something, and he said something else; it was all rushed and hazy; and they got off the phone.

The teacher who had been her mentor many years ago—the same man who had supplied the useful metaphor for therapists' lapses of attention—used to say that every choice we make is either a growth choice or a fear choice. She wasn't sure that he was right about this: she found it a painfully strenuous way to look at life, a way of looking at life that never let anyone just relax. But she was sure that getting off the phone so quickly had been a fear choice.

After a first flush of self-loathing—she was supposedly a student of the human soul, and she'd acted like a child—she tried to be gentler on herself. Even though Patrick was still with his wife, it felt as if he were asking her out on a date. And she hadn't been out on a date since her first date with Adam, all those years ago. In terms of her romantic life, she
was
a child. It was natural that she'd acted like one.

Part of the problem was that, after the turbulence of the past year, she was no longer used to having good things come into her life. Whatever Patrick's situation, even if she and Patrick were going to be "just friends," his calling her was indisputably a good thing. She may have simply forgotten how to welcome the good things.

Here is a good thing, she thought. And this is my task. I have to learn how to welcome it.

Adam was sitting alone on his couch with a glass of scotch in his hand. It was the first peaceful moment he'd had in a week.

He enjoyed being alone in this apartment. Everything in it was new Except for his clothing and a few other personal items, all of his things—his furniture, his books—were in the old place, with Eleanor. This new place was soulless, but comfortable. This suited him fine.

He was twelve floors above the traffic on Fifty-seventh Street. It was a busy street, but he had double-paned windows. Everything was quiet here.

Izzy's manuscript lay untouched on the coffee table. Adam hadn't had time to read the newspaper lately, much less take up a burdensome obligation like this.

Adam looked at the first page with a familiar mixture of affection and exasperation. Izzy should have bought a new ribbon before he typed this thing.

Adam knew the characters made by Izzy's typewriter in the way someone else might know a friend's handwriting. Izzy had claimed that computers made things too easy—writing
should
require a physical effort—and near the end of his life he was still pounding gamely away at the tanklike manual IBM that he had bought in the 1950s. He must have gotten the thing repaired a hundred times. He was forever heading down to Osner Business Machines on Amsterdam Avenue to drop it off or pick it up.

Adam fingered the manuscript and took another sip of his scotch.

He knew in advance that it wouldn't be very good. Before Izzy died, Adam had come to realize that the problem with Izzy's writing was the problem with Izzy. He didn't have enough of the devil in him. Izzy always wanted to be the nice guy. He wanted to take care of everybody. This made him a wonderful husband and father: steadier, more responsible, more caring than Adam had ever dreamed of being. But it had made him a bland writer.

In his books, he always took care of his characters too much. He never wanted to believe that any of them could be evil. So if one of his characters did something morally reprehensible, Izzy would never just go with it; he would surround the action with context, explanation, extenuation. It was as if he couldn't decide whether he wanted to be a novelist or a social worker.

Adam wasn't eager to be immersed again in the vague skim-milky kindness of his old friend's world.

He lifted up a stack of pages and read a couple of sentences from somewhere in the middle of the manuscript. Then he read a page or two from an earlier part.

It was set in the 1940s and 1950s and 1960s, the era of Izzy's youth, the era of his own. It was the same era, coincidentally, in which Adam's new novel was set, the novel Adam had been working on for the past few months. But this was unremarkable. Two old men turning back to the days of their youth.

Flipping through the book, he came upon a few things—a sentence or a situation—that had been taken directly from Izzy's life. A young married couple, weighed down by new responsibilities; one night after the children are asleep the woman says to the man, "Honey, if I ever wanted to have sex, it would be with you." Adam knew that Ruth had said this to Izzy a few months after their daughter was born. He remembered Izzy smiling ruefully as he quoted the line.