Breakable You (24 page)

"He's probably right," Samir said. "But he doesn't sound like much fun."

She would never have imagined that Samir would say that—that Schopenhauer didn't sound like fun. She wouldn't have thought that the word
fun
was in his vocabulary. In recent months they'd had passion, and exaltation, and maybe love, but she wasn't sure they'd had anything that could have been described
as fun
. So his use of the word now was a reminder that he was a man who could change. A man who had. And being reminded of how much he'd changed helped her look upon the prospect of a transformed life with less dread.

"You're right," she said. "He probably wasn't."

A word can change the world. If she were finally to give birth to this child, this last minute might turn out to have been decisive. Eighty years from now, this child, this Jack or Jill, would spend a mellow last Thanksgiving surrounded by children and grandchildren, and none of them—the Jack or Jill, the children, the grandchildren—would know that all of them owed their existence to a single utterance of the word
fun
.

Was that crazy?

She had thought more about going crazy in the last ten hours than she had in the previous five years.

"You amaze me," Candace said. "You amaze me."

Candace was Adam's editor.

Adam just smiled and had another sip of his martini.

"You really think it's that good?" Thea said.

"I don't just think it's that good. I think it's astounding."

Thea squeezed Adam's arm. "It sounds like the old man came through."

"I would love this book if I'd never heard of the author," Candace said. "But having read everything you've ever written—I can't say it makes me love it
more
, but it makes me love it in a different way. Because I think you've transformed yourself. You're writing about the same things you've always written about—the same places, the same people—but you're writing about it now with a tenderness I've never seen in your work before. I'm really stunned."

Adam smiled modestly. "I'm glad you like it," he said.

No one in the world knew the truth. No one but Adam. Over the course of twelve intense days he had retyped the manuscript onto his computer, making improvements along the way—playing with the language and the placement of scenes, shading characters a little differently. At the end of the process, he almost felt as if he
had
written it.

After typing the last word, Adam had made good use of the fireplace in his apartment by destroying both Izzy's typewritten manuscript and the carbon copy. Even if someone someday suspected the truth, some scholar with too much time on his hands, no one would ever be able to prove it.

"I don't like it," Candace said. "I love it."

She shivered slightly in her chair. It was kind of sexy—a swaying little shiver dance.

"It's weird. I've been working with you for twenty years, and I've loved everything you've written… but all of a sudden I feel kind of intimidated by you."

"That's excellent," Adam said. "I've always wanted to intimidate you, Candace."

Candace had never displayed the least bit of sexual interest in him—she'd always seemed to regard him as a father figure—but now, he was wondering…

Even Thea seemed awed.

"I'm afraid to read it," she said. "I'm not sure I'll be worthy of it."

"The people in sales can't believe it," Candace said. "They're all going crazy. Dean says he hasn't seen anything like this since
Ragtime"
Dean was the head of the sales department, a man with a long memory. "He says that it's only about once a generation that you see a book that appeals with equal success to people who want to be challenged and people who want to be entertained."

"I've always liked Dean," Adam said.

After lunch, Adam saw Candace into a taxi while Thea stayed behind on the sidewalk. When he returned to her, she said, "What now? What are you doing this afternoon?"

Thea, who was always running off because "Charlie can't be kept waiting," suddenly had time on her hands.

Adam took her hands in his. "I have a few appointments. I wish I could get out of them, but I can't." He had no appointments at all, but Thea had been cock-teasing him for so long—it was a considerable accomplishment, really, to be cock-teasing a man even while you're sleeping with him—that at this point the satisfaction of disappointing her was greater than the satisfaction of fucking her. He kissed her on the cheek, offered to get a cab for her, and got one for himself when she declined.

In the cab he turned his cell phone on and checked his messages. The only message he had was from Maud. She didn't say anything in particular, just hello. But she sounded needy.

This would be as good a time as ever to call her. He liked making phone calls from cabs.

She answered on the first ring, and sounded disappointed to hear who it was, then happy to hear who it was. There was someone else she'd wanted to hear from more, but she liked hearing from her father.

He employed a tone of insistent buoyancy to ask her how she was, hoping either to force her to share his own high spirits or, if that failed, at least to make it clear that he didn't want to listen to an account of why she couldn't.

"Okay," she said.

"What are you up to?"

"Just reading."

"Who are you reading?"

"Still reading for my dissertation. Schopenhauer."

Schopenhauer, who believed that the only way we might achieve our aims in life was by aiming for misery and suffering—because misery and suffering, no matter what we aim for, is what we will get.

Why did she always go for these sadsack philosophers; why was she always drawn to the work of the prematurely defeated? Her mother's influence, doubtless.

"Maybe you should broaden your reading," he said. "Maybe you should read a little Nietzsche."

"What?" she said. Their connection was bad. He heard three short beeps and then they were cut off.

He called her again.

"There you are," she said. "What were you saying?"

"Nothing."

Surely she had read Nietzsche, and surely she had barred him from her personal pantheon. His project of gloriously unapologetic self-creation probably left her cold. She probably only liked philosophers who were
nice
.

"Are you in a spaceship or something?" she said. "You sound all… futuristic."

"Taxi on Lex. Is that futuristic enough for you?"

Again he heard the series of beeps, and again the connection failed.

It was as if technology had gone backward. In the old days, when a telephone was a bulky thing that stayed plugged into your wall, you could actually
hear
the person on the other end of the line. Now you could take your phone anywhere, but you couldn't actually talk.

But he had come to like cell phones for just this reason. The phone cuts you off and you don't have to call back. It was as if the capriciousness of the cellular phone had enabled us to admit that we don't want to talk to one another at all.

Something was wrong with Maud. Eleanor felt sure of this, but she didn't know what it was.

She felt sure of it not because she saw any change in Maud, but because she felt a change in herself. She was a little more concerned than she should have been about whether Maud was going to eat her pie.

Maud was sitting at Eleanor's kitchen table on a Saturday afternoon, and Eleanor had just served her a slice of apple pie.

During her teenage years, Maud had never eaten enough. She was horrified by how quickly she was growing—in sixth grade she was taller than any of the boys in her class—and she tried to slow her growth by starving herself. It had been an anxious period for Eleanor, and ever since then, she'd found it gratifying to see Maud eat. It made her feel as if Maud were saying yes to being alive.

It had been a long time since she'd felt anxious about Maud's eating habits, and she wasn't sure why she was feeling so anxious now. It made her wonder whether she'd picked up on some feeling of unease or unhappiness from Maud without even being consciously aware of it.

Eleanor went to the refrigerator and got out eggs and butter and milk and mushrooms and cheese. She was cooking Maud an omelet for lunch. She'd served the pie first in keeping with Maud's odd tradition of starting off with dessert.

"So how are you?" Eleanor said. "How are things with my baby?" She was trying to find a light tone.

A flutter of displeasure crossed Maud's face, and Eleanor wished she hadn't used the word. She remembered how her own mother used to crow, "No matter how old you are, you'll always be my baby," and how much it used to annoy her.

"How's your dissertation going?" Eleanor said, as a way of acknowledging that Maud was much more than her baby.

"I haven't been able to concentrate on it that well lately," Maud said.

"Why is that?"

"I don't know." Maud was looking glumly at her pie. "I mean, what's my dissertation
about!
It's about the way people should treat each other. But is there really any point in writing about what different philosophers have thought about the subject?"

Eleanor's first impulse was to reassure her—writing about what philosophers think is more important than curing cancer!—but experience had taught her that smothering Maud with reassurance never helped.

"Well," Eleanor said, "what
is
the point?"

"I used to think there was a point," Maud said. "Maybe I'll think there's a point again. But at the moment it just seems so abstract."

During Maud's first semester in graduate school, she'd had a lot of similar doubts—
studying-philosophy-is-a-cop-out; I-should-be-doing-something-in-the-real-world
kind of doubts—but Eleanor thought she'd made her way beyond them long ago.

Maud's two plunges into depression had taken place years ago, but Eleanor could never rid herself of the fear that she was going to go under again. The smallest sign that Maud was unhappy could put Eleanor into a full-blown panic.

Eleanor put the omelet and the toast on a plate and placed it in front of Maud.

"What do you mean it seems abstract?"

Maud just shrugged. Eleanor waited, and then tried another avenue. "So how's the new guy?" she said, with all the casualness she could muster.

"He's good," Maud said. "He's good. He's not that new anymore. But he's still good."

"When do I get to meet him?"

"We'll see, Mom," Maud said. "We'll see."

Eleanor didn't press, and tried not to feel slighted. It was impossible to know, she thought, whether Maud is reluctant to introduce us because my opinion means so little to her, or because it means so much.

"What do you like about him?" Eleanor said. "Or is that an intrusive question?"

"No. That's not intrusive. He's really smart."

Eleanor was about to say,
That goes without saying
. All of Maud's boyfriends had been smart. But she didn't want to interrupt her daughter's train of thought.

"And he feels things deeply," Maud said. "And he's never fake. He may not tell you everything he's thinking, but he never pretends to be thinking one thing while he's thinking another. I don't think he'd be capable of it. Why are you smiling?"

"I'm smiling because he sounds like a good person. And I'm smiling because everything you've said about him could also be said about you."

"Thank you," Maud said quietly.

But she still seemed uneasy.

"Are you okay?" Eleanor said.

"Sure."

"Really?"

"Really."

It was frustrating to be shut out of your child's life.

Eleanor was sometimes amazed by how little she remembered of her children's infancy, but one of the things she did remember was the feeling that she knew everything about them, that they had no secrets from her. Of course it had never been true, but it had
seemed
to be true, for years.

And then they grow away from you, and then they leave home, and then when they reappear they seem to have less to do with the world you once shared with them than with the world they've left you for. Their friends understand them better than you do. They're like one more piece of modern technology that you don't know how to operate.

"I noticed that you've turned my room into a study," Maud said. "Does that mean you've been writing?"

"A little bit." Eleanor couldn't help smiling. She felt as if she were confessing to something scandalous.

"Does my room inspire you?" Maud said.

"It does."

Which was true, Eleanor thought, although she couldn't have said exactly how.

"What are you writing about?"

"I'm writing about my family. My mother and my sister. Not so much my father."

"You've written about them before. Right?"

"I've tried. I've never gotten that far."

"How's it going?"

"A little better. I think. I hope."

"That's great. Do you know why it's going better?"

"I don't know. I'm older?"

"That doesn't explain anything by itself. Does it?"

"Probably not," Eleanor said.

"Then what else could it be?"

Maud never let you get away with a lazy answer. After you answered her questions, you usually had a better understanding of what you'd been thinking in the first place.

She would have made a good therapist, Eleanor thought. Maybe better than I am.

"If I really had to point to one thing," Eleanor said, "I guess I'd say it has something to do with my work. You spend twenty years at a job, and it changes you."

"How has being a therapist changed you?"

"It's made me see life in a different way. When I was in my twenties, I wanted to be a writer, but I didn't believe in plots. I didn't think life
had
plots. So everything I wrote petered out after twenty or thirty pages."

"And you believe in plots now?" Maud said.

"I do. After twenty years of listening to people tell stories about themselves, I sometimes think that life is nothing
but
plot, if you think of plot as the choices we make. You could say that neurosis is a condition in which we think we don't have choices. And you could say mat the goal of therapy is to help someone see that he's already making choices, and that he could be making different choices."