Breakable You (14 page)

How could all this have been taken from the world?

"I love your chest," Maud said, and it seemed irrelevant, and he needed to get away from her, needed to be alone again. "I love how hairy your chest is," she said.

The day before she went into the isolation unit to begin receiving chemotherapy in preparation for her transplant, they took her to the park. They had been told that after she got out of the unit she wouldn't be able to go to the park again for at least a year. At the Prospect Park stables, she rode her favorite pony, a small bedraggled creature named Too Tall. At the end of the afternoon she patted him and said, "See you next week." They had tried to explain to her that she would be in the hospital for a long time, but it hadn't really gotten through. She was just beginning to understand the concept of time: for her, everything in the past was yesterday, and everything in the future was tomorrow. Of course she never saw Too Tall again.

So as he was tussling in bed with Maud he wanted to leave her and he wanted to kill her and he wanted to kill himself and he wanted to fuck her into unconsciousness and he wanted her to immobilize him with her sexuality, whatever that might mean, and where, he wondered, in all this mess, was there any room for affection? He didn't think there was any. "How does this feel?" she said, and it felt good, but what did it mean when he had lost the person he had been born to protect?

She had suffered terribly in her last two months, day after day after day. He could never blot out the memory of her agony when she woke up in the recovery room after they inserted her ports. Before the bone-marrow transplant, they inserted tubes, "ports," in her chest, threaded them into the arteries near her heart, so they could give her medicines and remove her blood for testing without repeatedly pricking her with needles. When the doctors had explained this he had thought that the ports would be barely noticeable, hidden beneath the skin, but instead they were long tubes that dangled down her chest, tubes with brightly colored plugs at the ends. They looked like stereo cables; she looked like you could plug her into your speakers and listen to
The Goldberg Variations
. She was three. Leila and he had tried to prepare her for the surgery, inserting tubes in the chest of one of her teddy bears, but Zahra didn't really understand. After the operation, Leila and Samir weren't allowed into the recovery room until she was awake—which meant that they couldn't go in until they heard her crying and screaming. She was lying on the gurney screaming with shock and pain and anger and disbelief: "I don't
like
these things! I want you to take them out!" Later that night, when Leila's mother visited, Zahra told her that the doctors had "made a mistake," because they'd left these things inside of her. At three, she had come to understand that the transfusions and the blood draws were necessary, but this—waking up in pain and finding long tubes coming out of her chest—was something that she had no explanation for. The next day she asked Samir if he used to have tubes in him when he was little. He said that he hadn't—he said that different people needed different things, and told her about a sort of cast that he'd had to wear over his nose after he'd broken it in a fight in ninth grade. "Did Mommy have the tubes?" she asked, and he had explained that she hadn't, but that she'd had to have something in her mouth—he explained braces to her, trying to make her believe that having braces was the same as having ports. She had listened intently as he had tried to paint a picture of a world that was a democracy of suffering, in which everyone had his own distinctive way of suffering, his own distinctive way of being violated, but in which all of us were violated, all of us bore some foreign extrusion upon our bodies. She had listened intently, and after he was finished she didn't say a word. He wondered at the time, and wondered still, whether she had any suspicion that he was lying to her: that the world is not a democracy of suffering; that some of us suffer unendingly while others hardly suffer at all; and that the ones who are singled out for suffering are singled out for no reason.

And here he was with this woman, this woman who had nothing to do with his life, pushing his cock into her anus, something he'd never done before with any woman and had never wanted to do, but with Maud he wanted to do everything, but he didn't
want
to want to do everything with her, because Zahra had never met her, because she had never met Zahra, had never loved Zahra, and he didn't want to fall in love with a woman who had never loved his love.

Someday I will die and Leila will die and all memory of her will vanish from the earth. How can that happen?

One night he got out of bed to go to the bathroom and when he came back he stood in the doorway, watching Maud as she slept. She slept effortfully, as if she was troubled. He had no idea what she was troubled by, and didn't want to know.

He thought that it might be a good idea to leave her, right this minute, and never see her again. Leave. Leave with your life. He picked up his shoes. He would leave her apartment stealthily and put his shoes on in the hall.

Even as she slept, she possessed some kind of force, in his imagination, at least. Even as she slept, he could still feel the pull of her: her largeness, her innocence, her brilliance, her naivete, her instability, her fear, her seductiveness, her hopefulness.

Leaving—now, in the middle of the night, while she slept—wouldn't be the right thing to do. If you are seeing a woman who spends all her time grappling with the problem of how we can learn to treat each other respectfully, a woman who is dedicated above all to exploring the "I and Thou" relationship, it would not be a nice thing to sneak out of her life without saying good-bye.

He wanted to leave her, but there was no reason to do it in such a hurtful way.

He stood there in her bedroom doorway, with his shoes in his hands, listening to her breathe. This was the last night he would be with her. He would see her again, to tell her that he couldn't be with her anymore, but he would never again hear her breathe in her sleep. So he stood there and listened. He listened for a long time.

Zahra used to talk in her sleep. When she was three, and they were putting the needle into her arm every night while she slept, one night, without even waking up, she had murmured, "Be very careful."

Sitting in the library on a Wednesday afternoon, trying to read Richard Rorty's
Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity
, Maud couldn't concentrate. She was eager to see Samir again and return to their sexual carnival. That was how she thought of their encounters.

At the same time as they excited her, something about them made her sick at heart. If you're beginning to see a man whose life has been blown apart by the death of his daughter, and if you offer him a love life, then the love life you offer him, she thought, should be something pure and true and spiritual, something that brings together body and mind and spirit. That wasn't what she was offering him, though. What she was offering him—it was as if she'd taken him to a pit and dumped him into it and jumped in after him, a vat of sticky murky brackened blackish broth.

She struggled with the book until five, not happy with Rorty's argument that we naturally feel sympathy for people we know, people in our own tribe, before we feel it for "the other," and that a humanitarianism that tries to deny this will inevitably be delusional. She didn't like the thought that we're naturally clubby, hardening our hearts to those not our own. Rorty wasn't a pessimist—he thought we could gradually enlarge our idea of who is included in the category of "our own"—but the minimalism of his short-term expectations distressed her.

After a while she put down the book and tried to write in her diary. She'd kept a diary ever since she was a girl, writing in small notebooks that fit into her back pocket or her purse. For days she had been trying to write about what it was like to see Samir, but she kept being stymied by the problem of language. The problem of how to refer to the sexual organs.
Penis
and
testicles
and
vagina
and
clitoris
—these words seemed so clinical that when she used them it made their sex acts seem stilted, inhibited, constrained, and they were anything but that. But on the other hand, words like
cock
and
cunt
and
clit
seemed leering and adolescent. There were no nouns that didn't sound slightly off. Everyone on the planet was preoccupied with sex, yet no one quite had the vocabulary to describe it.

When it got dark she left the library and headed to Samir's.

On seeing his expression—businesslike and dry—she knew that there would be little or no conversation again tonight, if he had his way. She sat on his couch, and instead of sitting next to her, he sat in a chair.

He was infuriatingly held-back.

"Why are you over there?" she said.

He didn't answer.

She worked off her shoe and put her foot on his fly and started moving it up and down.

"Do you think I'm smarter than you are?" she said.

"I don't know."

"You must have thought about it."

She was still working on him with her foot, so there was no danger that either of them would take the conversation too seriously.

"I think you're probably more profound than I am," he said.

"What do you mean?"

"There's more to you."

"What do you mean?"

"I don't know."

She had always been proud of how dexterous she was with her feet. When she was in her teens, after seeing the movie
My Left Foot
, she had tried to type a book report with her feet, and she hadn't done too badly. So now, still sitting casually on the couch, she was taking down his fly.

"And that's it? You haven't thought about it more than that?"

"I think you have more intellectual energy than I do."

"And what does
that
mean?"

"It means that when you get hold of a thought, you don't let it go. You follow it all the way, wherever it takes you."

"How do you know that about me?"

"I don't know."

"So when you add it all up," she said, "you do think I'm smarter than you are."

"Probably."

"That's good. I think so too."

In reality she had no idea who was smarter; she didn't think it was a useful or interesting question. But she liked talking this way with him. She liked playing the part of someone utterly self-assured.

Maud had never been comfortable with herself sexually. She had always felt too large, too loose: her legs were a thousand miles long, her breasts were udders. And she was not, in general, a champion of the human body. Sometimes she thought she would be happy as a creature of pure thought, a creature from a science-fiction movie—a giant pulsating brain in a glass shell.

She had always fumbled around in bed with men, not knowing what they wanted, not knowing what she wanted.

But with Samir, something was different. She felt the way a safecracker must feel in the moment when he hears the tumblers ease into place. He was a furious grief-stricken being, affronting the air when he walked; his smallness made him feel no match for the world, and even when their sex was violent, even when he was doing things to her that could be construed as sadistic, she knew that what he was wanting above all was to lose himself to her, to give himself up to her, to let her surround him and hold him and contain him. Small proud rageful sentimental devastated broken boy.

He was leaning back in his chair now, his eyes starting to close. She still hadn't moved off the couch.

He wanted her to take the lead in this relationship. And she thought: I can do that. I can move this thing.

In the morning he looked as if he was ready for her to leave, but she said, "You're going to take me out to breakfast today. There's a diner I like on Seventh Avenue."

He didn't look enthusiastic.

"Get dressed," she said.

She felt weird, being always on the verge of bossing him around, being sort of dominatrix-y, except that it was so obviously not what she was. What was happening, she thought, was that she was responding to some need he couldn't express and probably couldn't admit to himself. He needed to be dragged back into the world.

He had thought he'd just have a cup of coffee and get out of there, but after they sat down he realized he was hungry, and he ordered fried eggs and sausages and orange juice.

"Where did you get it from?" he said.

"Get what?"

"The idea behind your dissertation. Why is it so important to you?"

"I think I got it from my mother. When I was growing up, she was just starting to work as a therapist, and I loved to hear her talking about what she did. I once read that there are some therapists who want to tell you who you are, and some who want to find out who you are, and she's definitely the kind who wants to find out who you are."

"That's a good quality."

He was alarmed at himself, to be participating in one of these how-did-you-get-to-be-the-way-you-are conversations. Not just participating in it, but initiating it. He didn't know the source of this awful mellowing. But the fact was that sitting across from her in the diner, with the sunlight splashing through the window and making it difficult, at moments, to see her, he felt relaxed, and the question he had asked her was one that he'd been wondering about for weeks.

Years ago, a friend of his had described what went on in his mind when he met an attractive woman at a party: "You know you're gonna have to do all this
talking
. You know you're going to have to listen to her
ideas
. But it's all just a game, because you know, and if she has any brains at all, she knows, that listening to her is just the price you pay for taking her home and fucking her. It's like paying a toll."

His friend had said all this with a know-it-all smile, as if he was sure that every man felt this way. But Samir had never felt this way. He had always felt something like the opposite: if he didn't love to listen to a woman, he had no desire to take her home.