Breakable You (15 page)

During these last few weeks he had tried to be like his old friend, but it had been an effort. He kept wondering about Maud, wondering about her thoughts, her goals, her life. He kept thinking about her and then forcing himself not to. But he felt his indifference faltering.

After breakfast they took a walk through the park and they passed a kid pulling another kid in a red wagon and somehow she was telling him about the tonsillectomy she'd had at the age of four.

"My parents told me I'd be going to sleep for a while, and after I woke up I'd have ice cream. The last thing I remember was being in a red wagon in the hospital with a nurse wheeling me down the hall. I was sitting there waving to my parents. Very excited. And then I woke up in the morning and my throat hurt. And they didn't have any ice cream. They said the hospital ran out."

He was looking at the ground as she spoke. He was moved by her story, more than she could ever know. He saw her as a little girl, hopeful, ready to be treated well, ready to trust.

He glanced up at her and saw that her face was bright red.

"You must think I'm an idiot," she said.

"I don't know what you're talking about."

And then he did. She didn't think she had a right to tell this kind of story, to dwell with a nostalgic sadness on her childhood disappointments, when his own daughter had suffered and died.

He would have liked to tell her that it was all right: she was allowed to talk about her life without testing every word against the greater sorrow suffered by his daughter.

He didn't say this, however, because he didn't want to speak of these things.

She still had bright red blotches on her cheeks and throat. A woman who blushes, at this late date. At this moment in history. Astounding.

To reassure her, he took her hand.

Her brother Carl was coming to visit that weekend, and she was telling Samir about her niece and nephew. "When I spent a week with them over the holidays last year, my entire picture of human nature changed."

"How?"

"I used to think that people were good. Plato and Aristotle believed that. They believed that everyone seeks to do good, and that the problem is just that we don't always recognize the good. I believed this, because I
wanted
to believe it."

"And your niece and nephew made you see that people are basically evil?"

"They made me see that everyone starts off as a bundle of possibilities, and that goodness isn't there from the start. It's something that has to be learned."

"What were they doing that made you see that?"

She answered him at length, as if reciting a philosophical argument, and as he listened he experienced a peculiar elation. He loved the way she took everything so seriously. She threw herself headlong into ideas; she
lived them
.. When she bought a Popsicle, Seneca was beside her, contemplating the act; when she visited her niece and nephew, Plato was there, and she and Plato were disagreeing. If she were just a tiny bit different, he might consider all this pretentious, but he could see that there was nothing forced about it, nothing self-conscious: she wasn't pretending to think this way, she really did. He wasn't sure he'd ever met anyone who lived her ideas out in this way.

He was surprised by what he was feeling.

It was a beautiful day—it was a week away from winter, but the landscape seemed to be on the verge of blooming—and although it was hard for him to admit this, it wasn't just sex anymore. He wanted this. He wanted her. He wanted to be here, walking through the park with her, holding her hand.

Patrick looked ill at ease. He looked like someone who had never set foot in the big city before.

"Eleanor Levin, I presume," he said. He kissed her on the cheek.

"Eleanor Weller," she said—because she liked her married name better, and because she wanted to remind him that she wasn't the girl he had known all those years ago. She was that girl—she had that girl inside her—but she also wasn't.

Not that she really needed to remind him. She weighed about fifty pounds more than that long-ago girl had weighed, and her hair, once brown and flowing, was now gray and close-cropped. As he took her hands, she watched his face, super-alert for any sign of disappointment. But she couldn't find any.

He hadn't aged that well either. In his youth he had been rugged, athletic, prematurely weatherbeaten, but in a picturesque way. Now he looked beery and tired, and his face had the unnatural redness that comes with decades of addiction to nicotine.

They had arranged to meet at Rockefeller Center, near the skating rink. Jewish to the bone, she nevertheless found the Christmas season exhilarating, and this spot, overlooking the skaters and just beneath the enormous illuminated tree, sometimes seemed to her the most glamorous place in the world.

"This city is incredible," he said. "I feel like a country bumpkin."

"You look like a country bumpkin."

"Really?" He looked down at himself. "Is it the tie?"

He was wearing a string tie, which did, now that he mentioned it, look absurd.

"I feel like I'm on a date with Gene Autry," she said. "The singing cowboy."

"I think Roy Rogers was the singing cowboy."

"Gene Autry could carry a tune."

She took his hand.

"Are you ready for that hot chocolate?" she said.

It was a hot chocolate with a history. Thirty-eight years ago they'd planned a ski trip, but Patrick broke his leg the week they were supposed to go. She kept asking him to go with her anyway, trying to paint a romantic picture of evenings spent drinking hot chocolate and reading in front of a fire, nights spent holding each other under a stack of blankets in the brilliantly chilly night. But he hadn't wanted to go there if he couldn't ski, and she'd ended up taking her sister.

They walked north on Sixth Avenue. She didn't know exactly where the proposed hot chocolate might be.

She felt terribly self-conscious, self-conscious about being old and fat and in no way the fox that she had once believed she had at least a chance of being.

"I'm glad I gave myself an extra hour to get lost in," he said. "You told me to get the subway on Sixth Avenue, and I walked and I walked and I couldn't
find
Sixth Avenue, until I finally stopped on the Avenue of the Americas, which I'd walked past around fifteen times, and asked somebody where Sixth Avenue was, and he told me I was on it."

She said something, but a moment later she had no idea what she'd said, because she couldn't stop thinking about how she'd let her body go to pot. She remembered how attracted to her he used to be. There was no way on earth he'd feel that powerfully attracted to her now.

He stopped at a souvenir stand. "I promised Maggie I'd get her one of these," he said, and bought a T-shirt with a photo of John Lennon, himself wearing a T-shirt, which read new york city. Maggie was the second of his two children, a high school sophomore still living in Oregon. "When John Lennon died she wasn't even born yet, but she's a Beatles fan now, and John is her favorite Beatle."

They found a cafe on Central Park South. The waitress was a beautiful young woman with a French accent that might have been real. She was wearing a skirt with a slit down the side. She gave them their menus and swayed away.

Eleanor wished that she didn't have liver spots on her hands. She laid the menu down and put her hands under the table.

"It's really good to see you," Patrick said.

"It's good to be seen," she said, which was an old Steve Allen joke, but she meant it. She had always remembered him as someone who tried to see her as she was. Whether this would still be true, she had no idea.

She was hoping that he would view her charitably. She was hoping that he would see her not as the battered bag she had become, but the woman of spirit he had known when they were young. She was hoping that he would look past the cruelty of the way she had left him and see that she was not a cruel person but a kind person who had committed a desperate act.

As soon as these hopes passed through her mind, she wondered whether what she was thinking about herself was true. Was she still vital in her spirit? Was she a kind person? These are probably questions one can't answer about oneself. They can be answered only by others.

He was looking at the menu. "What's the difference between a café au lait and a cappuccino?" he said. "I've never been able to figure it out."

At the same time as she was hoping that he would see her charitably, she was trying to see him charitably.

He looked so provincial. He looked all wrong for New York. He looked like an elderly fur trapper who had ventured into the city in search of a wife. His suit looked as if it was made out of Dacron: it was probably a wash-and-wear suit from Sears. She was trying to stop her mind from noticing these things. She was trying to stop her mind, her critical evaluating mind, from criticizing and evaluating him. She had to remind herself that there was no reason he should have known that the Avenue of the Americas was Sixth Avenue. New Yorkers tend to forget that knowledge of the city's geography is not innate. There was a part of her that was thinking, despite herself, that if he hadn't known this, then he was stupid.

She had to stop evaluating him, had to stop noticing, for example, that his teeth were very yellow, much more so than she'd remembered. Decades of late-night negotiating sessions fueled by coffee and cigarettes.

She tried to change her perspective. If he were a New Yorker he probably would have bleached his teeth by now, in anticipation of the moment when a reporter for
Eyewitness News
might stick a microphone in his face and ask him his opinion about some episode of "labor strife" in the sanitation department. Like everyone else in New York, he would have wanted to be ready for his close-up. She tried to see the fact that he hadn't as a sign that he wasn't interested in playing careerist games. She tried to see his teeth as nobly yellow.

She felt herself being buried under a mass of trivial and ungenerous thoughts.

"Cappuccino… I'm not sure," she said. "So you're here for a week?"

"I wish. That was the original plan. Katie went to the trouble of setting up a whole week's worth of activities. But I got a call this morning that they just took a strike vote out at United Paper, and the rep who's been working with them is just a kid, so it looks like I have to go back on Monday."

"That's a drag," Eleanor said, feeling relieved. When he had told her on the phone that he was coming out for a week, she had been nervous about the idea of seeing him more than once. Once was enough: manageable, contained. She would be able to carry the experience back to her apartment and meditate on it. A single nugget of experience was as much as she could digest right now, would nourish her through the winter.

"Yes. But that's the life of a union rep."

They were at a moment where the conversation could go in either of two ways. They could speak from the heart, about things that were real, or else they could stay on the surface. And perhaps everything that would flow from this moment would take its shape from the choice they made.

She opted for the surface.

"Do you still believe in your work as much as you used to?" she said.

It wasn't entirely a superficial question. One of the things she had admired about him had been his commitment to his work. He was as passionate about the labor movement as any artist she knew was passionate about art. But in asking it she was making a choice to avoid the subject of their own past.

"Even more so," he said.

"I wouldn't have thought that was possible."

"This country has gotten so much worse. So much more cruel. I always knew the labor movement was important, but now I think it's more important than ever. Did you see
The New York Times
this morning?" He reached into the breast pocket of his jacket and brought out an article he'd clipped from the paper. "It's part of their series on poverty in America. Forty million Americans don't have health insurance. Ten percent of American children are going to bed hungry. It amazes me that we think of ourselves as a civilized country."

"That's sad," she said.

She had forgotten about his habit of clipping newspaper articles, producing them in the middle of conversations, and quoting important statistics. It was a habit that she had not been entirely in love with.

"It is sad," he said.

"I'm glad to know you haven't changed. Every once in a while, when I've felt like things are just getting worse and worse, it's been a little bit of a comfort to know that you were probably still out there, going town to town, patiently talking to one person at a time about the idea that things might be different."

"Still out there," he said. "Still talking union. Still sleeping in fleabag hotels and getting up at five so I can be at the factory gates when the night shift is getting off, so I can buttonhole one or two of them and take them out for coffee and find out if they want to get organized."

He sounded weary, but she felt sure it was the mock weariness of someone who loved what he was doing and wouldn't dream of doing anything else.

They talked about their jobs; they talked about their children; and after a while they were silent.

She couldn't put the serious things off forever.

"So what's this complicated situation with Diana?" she said.

"Diana." He took the salt shaker out of its holder and nodded slowly, as if it had given him secret instructions. "We're together, we're not together, we're together. It gets to the point where even we have trouble keeping track."

"What was it when you last checked?"

"When I last checked. When I last checked we were together."

The waitress swept over and gaily refilled their water glasses. Eleanor wondered how the two of them looked to her. Oldsters reminiscing about days of yore.

"Do you know what you want?" she said.

"I do. But… thirty years is a long time."

"These things are hard," she said. "I sympathize with you."

Profound, she thought.
Give that woman an honorary doctorate
.