Breakable You (33 page)

The doorman in Ralph's building, Brendan, had known her for years. He called Ralph on the intercom. He waited. He tried again. He got no answer.

"That's weird," Maud said.

After David was born she'd bought a cell phone. She got it out and called Ralph, in case his intercom was on the blink. No answer.

"I'll try him again in two minutes," Brendan said. "Maybe he's in the shower."

"This isn't like him," she said. "Did you see him go out or anything?"

"Didn't see him. But I just got on an hour ago."

Maybe he'd gone out on an errand that had taken longer than he'd expected. Maybe he was in the shower. Maybe he had collapsed, and was lying on the floor of his apartment, unable to crawl to the phone.

Samir's death had changed the way Maud thought about the future. It wasn't that she always expected the worst; it was that she never expected anything.

But something bad must have happened. Their Friday dinners were as sacred to him as they were to her. Ralph would no more forget one than the sun would forget to rise.

She didn't want Ralph to die alone. Poor brave lonely Ralph deserved something better than that.

She was about to ask Brendan if they could get into his apartment, when her cell phone rang. The number was one she didn't recognize. It turned out to be Ralph.

"I'm so sorry," he said. "I'm up in Westchester. Somebody called me to take a look at her father's estate. He left behind a lot of paintings. I just lost track of the time."

Long before children know what a telephone is, they hate to see their mothers talking on one. David, who had been quiet, started to shriek.

"I'm so sorry," Ralph said. "I was really looking forward to seeing you."

"Yeah," she said. She heard the tone of her own voice—dead, except for a trace of sarcasm—and couldn't believe it. This was her most loyal friend, and she sounded like a disaffected teenager, pissed off at one of her parents.

"Can we get together tomorrow?"

"I don't think I'm free tomorrow," she said. "This whole week sucks, actually. Why don't we just get together again next Friday?"

Of course she didn't have anything to do the next day, or the day after that, or the day after that. Her calendar—she didn't even have a calendar anymore.

"Are you sure?" Ralph said.

"Of course I'm sure, Ralph. And if I happen to be in Westchester next Friday, maybe it'll occur to me to give you a little jingle, half an hour after I'm supposed to be here."

"Maud, I really am sorry."

"Do you know what it's like to drag David across town on the bus? Do you know that I'm standing outside your building right now? Just about to drag him back?"

He didn't say anything, or if he did, she didn't hear it. David was still wailing.

"Sorry," she said. "It's okay. I'll see you next week."

Brendan was reading a book, acting as if he hadn't heard anything.

It was early enough for her to walk home through the park. She walked slowly, with her hands cupped under David in his sling. A five-week-old being carried by a five-year-old, she thought, if what we're talking about is the emotional intelligence of the two parties.

She still couldn't believe that she had been
that
angry at Ralph. It wasn't like her.

Or maybe it was like her, and she just didn't want to admit it to herself.

Walking on East Eighty-sixth Street, she saw a scary-looking homeless woman inside a Rite Aid, and then realized that what she was seeing was her own reflection in the window.

When she got back to her apartment, she changed David's diaper, nursed him again, and lay down on the bed with him, hoping that he'd fall asleep quickly so she could have some time to herself. Instead, he started screaming. Lately he'd been refusing to go to sleep unless she held him in her arms and walked with him. If she tried to put him down—even if she lay down next to him; even if she laid him on her stomach—he screamed, and wouldn't stop screaming until she gave in.

His scream was loud, furious, high-pitched, effeminate, and very drawn-out: he could hold a note longer than Pavarotti. Some of the books advised you to let the child scream himself out in a situation like this—when he isn't hungry or in pain. But she couldn't. His scream was pitched to her deepest frequencies. It pierced directly to the panic center of her brain, leaving her unable to think.

She lay down next to him, admiring him and wanting to strangle him at the same time. What she admired was his sheer insistence on having his own way. It gave her faith in humanity. She knew about humanity's well-documented tendency to obey authority, but alongside this was an inborn cussedness, an aversion to being controlled.

Finally she picked him up and began to walk back and forth in her bedroom, and he calmed down. She knew from experience that he would start screaming again if she (a) stopped walking, (b) tried to read anything or talk on the phone or watch TV while she was walking him, or (c) tried to hold him in a different position. He liked to be held low, down around her hips, as if he were a football and she about to hand him off. If only there was somebody to hand him off to. It was uncomfortable—she ended each day with a backache—but it was the only position in which he'd keep quiet.

Her dissertation was on the desk, unfinished.

But what was the point of finishing it, really?

Misery doesn't leave the world untouched. It lays its hand on everything. Until a moment ago, she'd thought of her dissertation as a solid piece of work. Whether or not she'd done justice to the subject, she felt sure that the subject was worth writing about. The question of how we should treat one another is the central question in personal relationships and the central question in world politics. It's
the
question.

This is what she had thought. But now she saw she was wrong.

All of her time in graduate school had been spent on this—this mincing meditation on how we should treat one another.

And it had all been a mistake. She'd inherited the good-girl gene from her mother: the gene that makes you too ethical, too aware of the needs of others, too nice. Her mother had thrown away her life. She'd made a fetish out of caring for others because she lacked the courage to take care of herself. It was as if Maud had taken the mistake her mother had made with her life and turned it into a philosophy.

If each of her parents had been a little bit more like the other, then each of them might have become a complete human being. Her father would have had some feeling for other people and her mother would have had some drive.

Maud had fucked up, by building a temple to her mother's weakness.

The reason it was a fuckup, the reason it mattered, was that the ideas that had consumed her for the past three years had left her unequipped
to
handle what she was feeling now. What she had felt when Ralph stood her up. What she was feeling right this minute.

What she was feeling right this minute:

1. The urge to throw this baby out the window.

2. The urge to put this baby on someone's doorstep and ring the doorbell and run.

3. The urge to grab this baby's head and dig her fingers into his skull.

She'd never known she had this kind of aggression in her.

All of her reading and thinking had not prepared her for the way she felt, had not given her a framework in which to place it. Maybe she'd been in the wrong field. She should have been getting a Ph.D. in psychology, reading Freud and Reich and Klein, people who would help her understand the depth of sheer aggression in the human animal, the pure hot vibrancy of the need to hate. People who would help her come to terms with the part of her that wanted to drop her son out the window.

She thought of the times she'd read about people who'd killed their babies and had told the police that they'd done it because the babies wouldn't stop crying. She used to wonder how people could do such things. Now she wondered why it didn't happen more often.

"I have some news," Patrick said. "It's insignificant compared to what you've been going through, but it's news."

She was sure she knew what it was, but she was still excited to hear it.

"Diana and I have been living apart for a month now."

She wanted to say,
That's wonderful
. Of course she said no such thing.

She was glad that they were on the phone instead of face-to-face. She was glad he couldn't see her smiling.

She'd somehow felt sure all along that he would leave Diana. She'd been sure he'd leave dull Diana, now that he knew she was free. This confidence had made her feel the way she used to feel in her twenties: desirable, super-foxy, the fetchingest girl in town. After decades of earnest selflessness—helpmate, mother, therapist—it was a thrill to learn that she could be selfish on occasion too.

"How are you doing?" she said.

"Well, it's hard. It's been harder than I thought it would be. Even though I'm sure it's the right thing."

"I'm glad that it's been harder than you thought."

"You're glad? Why is that?"

"You lived together for thirty years. You have two children. It should be hard. What would it say about your lives together if it weren't hard?"

"I've thought the same kind of thing myself."

She was also glad that he'd waited a month before calling her. It made it seem more real.

"How are your daughters taking it?"

"My daughters never cease to confound my expectations. Maggie's taking it serenely. She didn't seem surprised, and now she just glides through the new arrangement. She stays with me three nights a week, and as far as I can tell, she's happy. Kate, however, is furious. I've already been to New York once for a peacekeeping mission, and I'll be coming out soon for another."

She was hurt to learn that he had been out here once without calling her, but on second thought, she thought it was a good sign.

"I'm going to be in the city for a week. I was wondering whether you might be free."

The thought of seeing him was exciting. The thought of sleeping with him was frightening.

"I should warn you about one thing," she said.

"What's that?"

"I intend to play hard to get."

"You've been playing hard to get for a while now. That doesn't put me off."

After she got off the phone, she tried to write. She was still working on her memoir about her family, her effort to excavate her old life. Sometimes it was hard to stay with it, in the midst of everything that was going on. But she had the superstitious idea that they needed her—her mother, her father, her sister—the idea that she had been charged with the responsibility to leave behind a record of their lives.

Many years ago, Adam had remarked that a piece of writing is only worth doing if you're a different person at the end of the process than you were at the beginning. Much as Eleanor disliked thinking that anything he'd ever said was worth remembering, she often thought about his words, because over the last year, she had begun to feel like a different person.

The more Eleanor wrote about Joanna, the less Eleanor felt like the younger sister. It was the first time that Eleanor had called upon herself to walk around Joanna, to think about her critically, to put her in the context of her time and place, to think about the choices she'd made and the choices she'd never made. During the past months, what had come to seem most prominent about Joanna were the choices she'd never had the chance to make. She had never been a mother, never worked at a challenging job, never had to face the death of her parents, never had to chart the unexpected paths a love affair takes when it has endured past the four-year point that Wilhelm Reich once said was the natural term of any erotic relationship.

Joanna had begun to seem like a child. A child, and a child of her time. Before computers and VCRs and ATMs and cell phones; before Ronald Reagan and George Bush the first and George Bush the second and the United States' awful turn to the right. Eleanor had always had a rich dream life, and in her recent dreams her sister had appeared in a guise different from any she'd worn before. She was a mere girl, hesitant and shy.

Eleanor sometimes felt like she was becoming a grownup—"differentiating," in the lingo of her trade—at the belated age of sixty. It wasn't entirely pleasant. She was growing out of an identity she'd become comfortable with.

Eleanor had lost the ideal older sister, the invisible protector, whom she had always carried around in her thoughts. Really, she had lost her family. The more she wrote about the past, the more she understood that she herself had been the family darling, and that Joanna had suffered for this.

A year ago, when she'd finally begun to write, she'd thought that writing about her family would make her more connected to them. That wasn't the way it had turned out.

Over the past decades, whenever she'd daydreamed about going back to writing, she had thought that it would bring her a harmony and wholeness that she'd lacked. She had thought it would make her feel closer to her essential self. But the opposite had happened. It had led her to understand that she had no essential self; it had led her to understand that she was a much more impure creature than she had believed. And instead of restoring her family to her, it had taken them away. She had written her way into a profound solitude.

Eleanor took a long breath through her mouth. She was trying not to breathe through her nose, because Maud's apartment stank. Soiled diapers were everywhere—on top of the TV, on top of the toaster oven, next to the kitchen sink. Maud used disposable diapers, of course, but she was neglecting to dispose of them. A pile of dirty laundry was slumped like a dead body in the corner of the bedroom. All the windows were closed and the shades drawn.

Eleanor asked Maud when she'd last been out of doors.

"I think it was Thursday. Or maybe Wednesday."

"What have you been doing?"

"Nursing. Reading. Watching TV."

"Anything else?"

"Not that I can think of."

"Maud," Eleanor said, "this is bad."