Breakable You (27 page)

He didn't need to say more.

Samir spent two days in Bethesda, finishing his remodeling job. Around midnight on the second day, he was finally through. He'd already made a reservation at a Days Inn, but at the last minute he decided to drive back to New York. He wanted to see Maud. He didn't want to wait.

He talked to her on the phone for a minute before he started out.

"You know," she said, "I was thinking that we should let the baby choose its own name. That would be more democratic. Don't you think?"

"When would this happen?"

"When the time comes."

"And when would that be?" he said.

"If it's a girl, twelve. If it's a boy, eighteen."

"Sounds good to me."

"You don't have
to
come back tonight, you know," she said. "I'm going to sleep in a couple of minutes."

"I want to wake up with you," he said.

There is nothing quite like the pleasure of a long night's drive—a long night's drive on empty highways when you're alone and relaxed and excited about where you're heading, and you have music that you love in the tape deck. He had a tape of two of Beethoven's late sonatas, which were always described as "difficult," but which had made sense to Samir as soon as he heard them and had become steadily more interesting and more challenging to him the more he had listened to them.

He wished he'd remembered to buy a cup of coffee, though, before he'd started out.

When he was a boy, his family used to go to Chicago every summer to visit his father's old friends, and his father always liked to begin the drive at night. Samir remembered the cozy feeling of being in pajamas in the backseat while the car moved along in the late-night silence.

Much of parenthood, he thought, consists of efforts to recreate the experiences you had as a child. He and Leila used to go to the Adirondacks every summer. By his choice, they would start out late. Zahra, in her pajamas, would sleep in her car seat in the back. But it never felt the way he wanted it to feel. He had imagined that it would make him feel like the incarnation of the idea of fatherhood: confidently guiding the car through the night while his family slept, feeling honored to be entrusted with the responsibility of protecting them. But it never felt that way. He was never able to forget that he couldn't protect Zahra at all, because the forces that were menacing her were inside her.

I tried to roar back at them, but I couldn't scare them away.

He wondered whether the same experience, two years from now, would be a perfect joy. Himself at the wheel, Maud asleep in the front seat, and their baby, democratically unnamed, asleep in the back.

He was excited about the life that he and Maud were going to have together. He had emerged, finally, into a sort of clearing, where he could welcome life again, where he could welcome the future. He wanted a future with her.

This is one of the strangest things about life, he thought. If I'm being honest with myself, I have to admit that I love Maud more than I ever loved Leila. I think Maud and I can grow together, over the long haul, in a way that Leila and I would never have been able to. I think this is my first real chance at fulfillment with a woman, mind and body and soul. But if Zahra had remained alive I never would have met Maud.

Maybe, he thought, you don't have to hold the two thoughts together. You can miss your beloved child, miss her every day of your life, and you can treasure the joy of finding this beloved woman, and you don't have to connect the feelings, because when you connect them they destroy each other. Who was it who said, "Only connect"? Sometimes it's wiser not to.

He was tired. If I pass a rest stop, he thought, I'll stop and rest. Not stop and rest. That's not what I meant. I'll stop for a cup of coffee. One cup in the restaurant, one cup in the car. That will keep me buzzing until I get there. The only rest stop whose name he knew was the Vince Lombardi, but that was far from here, on another highway. "Winning isn't everything; it's the only thing." That was the only thing he knew about Vince Lombardi. It was a saying that was supposed to be significant—Lombardi was the George Patton of football or something like that. But I've never known what it means, he thought. I don't see the distinction.

He passed a billboard with a grinning Michelin Man. Why are they trying to sell a beer with a cartoon character who's so
fat
?

No: that's Michelob.

The sonata was cresting. It had begun on such a mild note, like a person walking quietly into the room. The music started out as a person and turned into a god. The vastness of Beethoven's mind.

The need to
use
the mind. The friends who refuse to believe I could be happy as a carpenter. No one believes that a carpenter has to use his mind. But you do. Conscientious craftsman-ship, tenaciously practiced over weeks and months and years, is something to be proud of. Because there's no showing off. The mind must enter the wood.

The mind must enter the wood? The kind of meaningless thought you have when you're tired. Or maybe it's not meaningless. I'll have to think about it again tomorrow, when I'm fresh.

Thoughts keep flowing off when you're tired, not caring where you want them to go. But isn't that always the case? You never control what you're thinking. You send a thought in a certain direction and see what it does. How does that happen? How do we think? I'll have to ask Maud. Do philosophers have to study the brain these days? Do they have to know about science? Funny that I've never asked her.

Last night in bed he realized that her body was already changing. Her breasts and her belly seemed to be wider and softer. He'd had a feeling of reverence as he touched her. How does
that
happen? Two cells join and set something in motion that can bring forth a Beethoven.

What must it feel like to the woman, to her? The quickening. That's a good word for it.

Their fucking was as intense as it had ever been, but it was also newly tender.

Maud was sleeping by now, in her bed. Zahra was sleeping under a hill. Not sleeping, just lying in the dark. Our future baby is inside Maud, working through the night, laboring to become a human being. Baby: listen to me. Someday I want to tell you about Zahra, your half sister.

Fuck the "half." Your sister.

The tape popped out of the tape player. He'd listened to the whole thing, evidently, but he hadn't heard much. He wasn't sure what he'd been thinking about for the last hour. He wondered if he'd passed any rest stops without noticing.

Coffee. I should have taken a thermos. What was that joke Howie told me in high school? The guy who said the thermos was the greatest invention. "When the coffee is hot, it keeps it hot. When the coffee is cold, it keeps it cold. How does it know?"

His eyes jerked open. He had been back in high school, in Howie's kitchen, listening to his old friend tell the joke. It was as if he had actually
been
in Howie's kitchen. He had driven perhaps ten yards in a dream state. Ten yards and fifteen years.

Howie's kitchen. Not where you want to be at sixty-five miles an hour. He forced himself to keep his eyes wide open.

Don't keep your eyes wide shut. Never saw that movie. Couldn't bring myself to go to a movie with such a stupid name. Why does Tom Cruise always remind me of Mickey Mouse? Nicole Kidman was sexy, though, in the commercial.

There's something to be said for keeping your eyes on the road. One little blink can bear you away. One night when he and Leila and Zahra were lying around watching a video, probably something like
Dance with the Teletubbies
, Leila, after a hard day of lawyering, was falling asleep, and she said, "When I close my eyes I see blue lights," and Zahra said, "Where? I don't see them!" So disappointed because she couldn't see the lights her mother saw.

It's not that hard to stay awake on the road. You keep the need to stay awake at the center of your mind, like a bright white light, and then you let the other thoughts wander off where they will. You can think about anything or nothing, or just watch the lights on the highway, one after the other after the other, or the Michelin Man or that girl Michele from kindergarten, that brainy chatterbox who moved away the summer before first grade. It's funny how your thoughts can skate off in different directions. Magical. You can be looking at the road and pondering the nature of cognition and remembering the smell of your kindergarten classroom and coming back to the road and then rising and watching the road from the sky and then rising higher into something that seems unselfishly unsubject to time. What does that mean? Nothing. The mind on skates. Roller skates or Rollerblades or whatever you find on your feet. And now they belong to the library. Not anyone's property anymore. Because a library is like socialism. Or the socialist dream. Ordinary murmurs can't be heard when you find so
wild the
lights, as if the pictures added up to a conscience, because the whole tradition wanted to be there first, which is not what a tradition
does
. It's funny how

After the funeral, everyone seemed lost. The ceremony had . been brief and spare, just as Samir would have wished, but it had been
so
brief and
so
spare that when it was over, no one seemed ready to leave the funeral home.

It was the first time Maud had met his parents. They could barely speak. Before the service, Samir's father had embraced her, and his mother had not. His mother seemed angry. Maybe she blamed Maud for his death. If I was his mother, I'd blame me too, Maud thought, although she wasn't sure why she thought this.

Ralph attended the funeral, looking lost inside a suit that had fit him a few months earlier. Celia and George were there, dressed in weirdly casual and sporty clothes. Maud's mother and father were both there. It was strange to Maud to see them standing next to each other. For a second she wondered whether they'd end up together again, after everything, but she didn't have enough mental energy to pursue the thought.

Maud had been hoping that her brothers would show up. She wasn't particularly close to them, and they were far away—Carl lived in Tucson, Josh in Los Angeles—but she kept thinking that one of them would suddenly appear. They were big strong men, and she would have liked to be held in their arms.

After the service, Maud saw a small slim dark woman giving Samir's mother a long embrace. Leila. She thought about going over to talk to her, but she didn't know if she wanted to. The decision was made for her when Leila slipped quickly out the door.

"What are you going to do now?" Ralph asked her.

At first she thought he was asking about the pregnancy, but then she realized he was only asking about the afternoon.

"I'm going to the cemetery," she said. "I'd ask you to come but his parents don't want too many people."

What
am
I going to do now? she thought.

Better to stop the pregnancy right now, because I can't do this without him.

Better to have the baby, because when he was alive we agreed to have the baby, and to change my mind would be to give death a double victory.

While Samir's parents waited for the limousine
to
take them to the cemetery, most of the other mourners stayed with them in the lobby. His mother, sitting in a chair that was too small for her, kept repeating that her baby was gone. Maud and Samir had once wryly commiserated over the fact that each of them had a mother who was fond of declaring that "you'll always be my baby." He'd said he was the only Arab man on earth who had a Jewish mother.

When the car arrived, Samir's mother lifted herself slowly out of her chair. As she walked toward the door, she put her hand against a wall to steady herself.

She's falling apart because her baby is gone, Maud thought. And I have to keep it together because my baby is coming.

Maud wished that she could allow herself to fall apart. All she wanted to do was what she had done when she first heard the news: sit on the floor and moan and call his name. But she couldn't give in to her grief. She didn't know what she was going to do about this pregnancy, but for now, she had to be strong.

She wanted the being taking shape inside her to have a chance to flourish.

Maud's mother took her hand and they walked out to the limousine. When they got in, Samir's parents barely looked at them. Maud had the feeling that they didn't think she should be there.

She had the terrible thought that Samir might have agreed with them.

Maud felt as if she'd been a very small part of Samir's life. She imagined a map of the things that had mattered to him: some of the territory would be covered by the struggle for a Palestinian state, some of it by his marriage to Leila, and some of it—most of it—would be taken up by his love of his daughter and his bereavement after her death.

If the soul lives forever, she thought, and if it has memories, then a few thousand years from now, his daughter will be the only thing about his earthly existence that his soul will remember. His soul will not remember me at all.

This is what she was thinking, but she was wrong. Samir had known her for only a little while, but duration means nothing. Souls know no time. She had revived him, she had redeemed the idea of the future, and if he'd never met her he might have died of old age without having come back to life. The map of his life had been redrawn before he died, and she was at its center. She was at its heart.

During the ride to the cemetery, no one spoke. Maud and Eleanor sat across from Samir's parents in small bucket seats. The limousine was cramped, and their knees were almost touching, but no one spoke. Maud felt as if there were two teams here.

Samir had reserved a plot for himself next to his daughter's grave. Maud had never been to Zahra's grave before. She felt as if she loved this little girl.

Samir went into the ground.

Eleanor and Maud took a taxi back to Manhattan. Maud wanted to walk for a while, so they had the driver let them out near Riverside Park.