Breakable You (19 page)

"You're a little like my mom," she said as they drove up the coastal highway in Maine.

"Thanks?" he said.

Being with him made her feel powerful. She knew that he thought of her as strong, and it made her feel strong. Two or three times they talked about the Middle East, and didn't agree, and she loved the feeling of being able to fight him. He wasn't sensitive; he could take whatever she could dish out. She felt like she did years ago when she took a "Model Mugging" class, where you learn how to defend yourself by fighting a man who is so wrapped up in protective gear that you can punch him and kick him as hard as you like. When she argued with Samir she could let herself go; she didn't have to hold back so as to seem feminine or nice. She loved the feeling of the full force of her mind meeting the full force of his.

In a hotel room in Maine, as she got ready to take a shower before dinner, Samir emptied out his pockets at the dresser, picked up his key ring, and looked at it. When she got out of the shower, he was sitting on the bed, holding the key ring in his hand. He seemed to be studying it.

He worked two keys off, looked at her solemnly, and gave them to her.

She recognized them. They were the keys to his building and his apartment.

"I'll probably regret this," he said.

"No you won't," she said.

On the last night of their trip they stopped in Cape Elizabeth, Maine, a town that neither of them had ever visited before. They ate dinner in a fancy restaurant and then, wrapped heavily in layers of clothing, walked down to the beach. It was late at night and no one else was there.

The night was clear and filled with stars. The moon was brightly shining, almost full, very low, browsing over the dark ocean.

Samir closed his eyes, trying to remember something.

" 'If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance'… I can't remember the rest."

"What's that?"

"Emerson. I read it in college."

Apart from their talks about the Middle East, it was the first time he had opened the door on his intellectual life, the first time he had admitted being moved by anything he'd read.

The moon and stars are our testing ground, she thought. In a place like this, any trace of dishonesty in your life feels shabby and shameful. Looking up at the purity of the night sky, she felt as if she were being urged to find a kindred purity in herself and to let herself be guided by it. If you're with another person in a place like this, it should be someone you love without reservation.

She felt happy to be here with Samir.

She wanted to say something to him, something like, "It's right between us." She didn't, though: it was still too early, he was still too skittish, for her to say anything like this. It didn't matter. It was right between them. She was sure.

On their first night back in New York, they stayed in his apartment. The next morning he left for work early and she slept in. After she showered, she started looking through his desk. She didn't feel good about this—she wasn't exactly respecting the categorical imperative—but he was still so mysterious to her, still so hidden, that she felt parched for information.

She couldn't find anything personal. No diaries, no letters. She hadn't really expected to: it was impossible to imagine him keeping a diary. But it was still a disappointment.

Finally she came upon a box of photographs.

She had never seen pictures of Zahra or Leila before.

If she had been the person she wanted to be, she would have looked at the pictures of Zahra first. But she didn't. She was the jealous rival before she was the tender friend.

Leila, she was relieved to discover, wasn't much. She was stick-thin and chilly-looking; she had features that might have been pretty in someone who was relaxed and gentle, but she looked brittle and tense. She looked like the kind of person it was good to get away from.

And then Zahra.

Maud had assumed, without having asked herself why, that Zahra had been a beautiful child. She didn't think Samir had ever described her that way, but she had assumed it. The truth was that she hadn't been beautiful.

Her disease had marked her. After Samir had told Maud about his daughter, Maud had spent some time reading about congenital blood diseases, and now she remembered reading that they sometimes led to facial deformities. Zahra's cheekbones and forehead were bulging and large. If you hadn't known she had a disease, she would probably have looked no more than a bit unusual, but once you knew it, you could see how it had deformed her.

Zahra must have been two or three when the picture was taken, but she didn't look like anyone's idea of a carefree toddler. There was something very complicated in her eyes. Maud tried to think of the words she might use to describe them. The first three she came up with were cautious, evasive, haunted. This little girl had known pain; it had taken up permanent residence within her. But there were other qualities in her expression: playfulness, certainly, and maybe something like irony. If you encountered a little girl with eyes like this, Maud thought, you would be fascinated by the thought of what she might become. You could imagine this girl becoming numbed, stunned, rendered stupid by years of physical and emotional distress, or you could imagine her becoming the most enthrallingly complex person you'd ever met.

When she saw Samir that night, they made love, and as they made love, she started to cry. She loved being with him, she was beginning to think that she hoped she could be with him forever, but it had suddenly occurred to her that she wouldn't be here with him if not for the death of his child. If she could have chosen, she would have chosen not to have met him, if it meant that his child would still be alive.

She didn't say anything, and there was no way he could have understood that she was crying because of his grief, his daughter, but when he realized that she was crying, he started to cry as well, and they made love this way.

"Paul Auster," Thea said, "makes me wet."

"Is that so," Adam said.

They were meeting for a quick drink in the Oyster Bar in Grand Central Station. Each of them had multiple appointments that day. Thea was having a martini with three olives and Adam a glass of wine.

"I never liked his books much," she said. "I read that trilogy,
City of Glass
, and I thought it was phony from the first word to the last. Bloodless. But in person! He was on Charlie last night to promote his new book, and… wow. I felt like I was in eighth grade again, having my first crush."

This was part of the price one paid for being with Thea. She liked to remind you that she desired other men, and she liked to remind you that other men desired her. Adam didn't know why she delighted in this.

"You should get together with him," Adam said. "Help him put a little blood in his books."

Thea was always making you pass little tests. She would say things that were certain to upset you and then she would watch what happened.

Usually Adam operated on the assumption that the way to pass the tests was to remain unruffled. But sometimes he thought that he was doing it all wrong, and that the only way to gain her respect would be to slap her around for a while. He had never hit a woman in his life, though, and it was too late to get started now.

"In other literary news," Thea said, "I ran into the power-wielding vegetarian at the Gotham Bar and Grill last night."

"Jeffrey?"

"The man himself. We were both waiting for people so we had a drink at the bar. And I'm sorry to say that he said that he'd thought over my suggestion, and it's a nonstarter." She was referring to the suggestion that he steer one of the new Gellman prizes Adam's way.

"That's too bad," Adam said. "Thanks for trying."

Adam hadn't been counting on anything, and the prize didn't mean that much to him. It would have been nice, but not getting one didn't sting.

Thea sucked the pimientos out of her olives and popped the olives into her mouth, one by one. Then she licked her fingertips. She looked as if she had something more to say. She looked as if she was saving the best part for last.

"He said that as much as he admires your early work, you haven't done much lately, and the prize is only given out to mark some major recent achievement."

This did sting.

Thea had said it smilingly, and he wasn't sure whether she actually was testing him, finding out whether he would show that he was wounded, or whether she was oblivious to the effect her words would have on him. Was that even possible? He had a fit of longing, brief but fierce, for Ellie: her sympathy, her tact.

"Maybe you're just not major anymore, old man."

Thea's eyes glittered with amusement. Adam had been cruel often enough in his life, when cruelty was required as a means to some end that he wished to bring about, but he'd never had any fondness for cruelty for its own sake. Nor did he have any fondness for being the recipient of the cruelty of others.

"They should give it to Paul Auster," Adam said. "Anyway, major is as major does." He wasn't quite sure what this was supposed to mean, but he thought it sounded okay. He took out his wallet, put a twenty-dollar bill on the table, and stood up and kissed her on the cheek. "Let's talk later in the week," he said.

As he left he wondered whether the price of being with Thea was starting to be too high.

Out on the street, he turned his cell phone back on and saw that he'd gotten another call from Ruth Cantor. He'd have to call her back soon. He'd dodged her successfully for quite some time, but in her last phone message she'd said something about health troubles, and although he knew this was the same ploy his mother resorted to when he wasn't returning her calls—his mother, who was still alive at ninety, in Miami Beach—he was programmed, nice Jewish boy that he was, to respond.

He had been dodging Ruth because he didn't want to talk to her about Izzy's novel. If he told her it was a masterpiece—which it was—then he would have no excuse not to start showing it around. And he didn't want to show it around. He had worked long and hard to leave Izzy in the dust, and he wanted him to stay there.

Particularly now that it had been established that it had been decades since he himself had written anything "major."

If Izzy's book were published, it would harm him—Adam—without helping Izzy, since Izzy could neither be helped nor harmed. If, for instance, despite the obvious literary brilliance of this novel, Adam, far from attempting to arrange for its publication, were to deposit it in the garbage can in his kitchen, and, after covering the book up with coffee grounds and eggshells and soiled paper towels and snotted tissues and the bitched-out butts of Thea's cigarettes, were to tie the bag closed and take it into the hall and drop it down the garbage chute into the enormous Dumpster in the basement, from where it would be carried to its final resting place, crushed under twenty tons of waste matter in the Sullivan County landfill—if Adam were to ensure in this fashion that no one ever laid eyes on the novel, it would not represent a betrayal of Izzy, for the simple reason that Izzy didn't exist.

Would it be a betrayal of Izzy's
memory
, though, even if it wasn't a betrayal of the man?

The idea, Adam thought, was meaningless. There was no way to be kind to Izzy now and no way to be cruel to him. One could no sooner betray him than one could betray the planet Mars.

The only person it mattered to, the only person whose fortunes might be improved by Izzy's posthumous rehabilitation, was, of course, Ruth.

To Ruth it would matter a great deal. As a literary widow, tending to whatever remained of her husband's reputation, she had been more faithful to Izzy's memory than the most fanatical Christian martyr had ever been faithful to God. During the past ten years—with her loneliness, with her illnesses—her life had been a thing of gray on gray. If Izzy's book were published, and if it turned out to be a success, then it might radically transform Ruth's last years. It might reverse her sense of the course her entire life had taken. It would give her the peace of a happy ending.

Ruth was so excited that she seemed unhinged. She was fluttering back and forth in her small kitchen, bumping into herself. She put two frozen crullers in the toaster oven; poured water into her Mr. Coffee; removed two more crullers from the freezer and opened the door of the toaster oven, and looked flustered by the magical appearance of the first two, and watched with helpless dismay as water, rather than coffee, began to drip into Mr. Coffee's carafe—she'd forgotten to put any coffee into the cone.

"Coffee. Coffee." She was peering into one cupboard after another. "I think I'm out of the Zabar's. Would instant do?"

"Instant would be fine."

She spooned some instant coffee into two cups, added water, put the cups into the microwave, pressed start, and then the lights went out.

"Oh, goodness," she said.

Adam found the circuit-breaker box in the hallway and flipped a switch and the lights came on again.

"How do you know how to do that?" Ruth said.

Ruth brought the crullers and the coffee cups into the living room on a tray. Adam, on the couch, reached for a cruller.

"Well?" she said. "What's the verdict? I'm so excited. I can't stand the suspense."

Adam had thought about this moment many times. But when the time came to speak, he found it difficult.

"What did you think?" she said.

He picked up his cup and brought it toward his lips, but then he noticed that the rim bore traces of lipstick, and he put it back down. The touch of irritation that he felt made it easier for him to begin.

"Ruth, you know how much I respected Izzy. You know how much I loved him."

She could already see where he was heading. He thought he saw her eyes starting to well up. He hoped he was wrong. He didn't want to deal with her tears.

"I wanted this book to be good," he said. "I wanted it with all my heart. But… Ruth. It wouldn't be smart to try to get it published. It really wouldn't be smart."