Breakable You (12 page)

He turned back to the first page and started to read. Adam had always been a quick, greedy reader, gulping down the books of teachers and rivals, keeping his eye out for anything he could steal. He read the entire book in less than three hours.

In part, it was what he'd expected. He'd expected an elegiac book about growing up in the last generation before the Jews became part of the American mainstream, the last generation in which secular American Jews could feel as if they belonged to a world apart. And this
was
part of its subject. But everything else about it was surprising.

The first thing that was surprising was that it was an energetic book. Izzy, in the last few years of his life, had been anything but lively, but this was the liveliest book he'd written. It was as if he'd been saving all his powers for one last ride.

And it was free of the narrative curlicues that had always been Izzy's trademark and his crutch. In this new book, each scene proceeded swiftly toward its target.

Most impressive of all, it was a tougher-minded book than its predecessors. It was free of cheap uplift. And Adam felt that he himself might have had a hand in this. He wasn't sure it would be obvious to anyone else, but it was clear to Adam that the main character, though he was mostly based on Izzy, had little bits and pieces of Adam thrown in. There were a few scenes that came directly from Adam's life, scenes that cast the main character in a not very favorable light, and these touches of not-so-goodness gave the character a distinctiveness that most of Izzy's protagonists had lacked.

Even before he'd reached the middle, he saw that this new book was stronger than anything Izzy had written since his thirties, when he was in the full bloom of vitality and ambition.

Maybe Ruth was right: maybe it
was
the strongest thing he'd ever written.

Adam read the book with a rising feeling of admiration. The old bastard had come through in the end, Adam thought. He'd tottered up to the plate on busted-up legs in the bottom of the ninth inning and hit the thing out of the park.

Adam had another drink and thought about his old friend's triumph. It was actually possible, he thought, that this novel would bring Izzy the success that had eluded him in his lifetime.

It's hard to comprehend that the dead don't care. We know it in our heads, but it's hard to
feel
the truth of it. Dead parents don't care whether we visit their graves; dead writers don't care about their reputations. Emily Dickinson died in the same condition as anyone else who writes for himself, any furtive unknown diarist; Herman Melville, at the end of his life, was just some local loser, not the awe-inspiring author of
Moby-Dick;
neither of them was ever to know the dimensions of their future success. Yet there is something in us that makes us think of Dickinson and Melville as conscious somewhere, taking pleasure in their readership, glad to have at last been understood.

But when the dead writer is someone you knew, it's easier to grasp the fact that he can't take pleasure in a revival of interest in his work. Adam had known Izzy for more than forty years. He remembered sitting next to him at the counter of Dave's Luncheonette on Canal Street in 1953 while Izzy waved his spoon around and talked excitedly about
The Adventures of Augie March
. He remembered the long walk they took in 1960 or 1961, when Izzy was trying to figure out whether he wanted to marry Ruth. He remembered Izzy's wedding, the birth of his daughter, his funeral. And he knew that no matter how much praise might be lavished on Izzy's last novel, the news would never reach the precinct that was now his home.

An artificial light was burning in Adam's fireplace, bright and heatless. It was a Friday night, and the city was doubtless full of manic life, but in his apartment, behind his reinforced windows, everything was silent.

His admiration for Izzy's book wasn't unstained by the despondency that can come over you when a friend succeeds. In a way, it would have been better if the book had stunk.

He heard the lock turning in his front door, and then the sound of Thea walking in. Her heels on the hardwood floor sounded brisk and confident. He was infatuated even with the way she walked.

And then there she was. The long and noble line of her, even if she herself was not particularly noble. It was midnight, and tonight, as on any other night, he had no idea what she might have been up to. He wouldn't have been surprised to learn that she was visiting a sick friend, and he wouldn't have been surprised to learn that she was stealing a sick friend's job.

"Hello, old man," she said.

Adam's scotch was sitting on top of the manuscript. Thea picked up the glass and finished it.

"How's your friend's book?"

Dead though Izzy was, he remained a rival, and Adam didn't, at the moment, feel like praising him.

"I haven't had a chance to look at it yet," he said.

Maud shook the bottle of perfume too vigorously and instead of sprinkling a few drops on her throat, she gave herself a bath. When I go outside, she thought, bees will descend on me.

She started making up a song:

No matter how crowded the barroom

I know that he can find me with ease

'Cause I'm always wearing a perfume

That can drive a horse to its knees.

She chose a dress that was both low-cut and short. She looked through her stockings and didn't find any that she wanted to wear and decided not to wear any. A phrase came into her mind:
I want to overwhelm him with skin
.

She was meeting him in ridiculous Brooklyn. The Brooklyn Academy of Music was showing a compilation of short films by Maya Deren, a surrealist dancer and filmmaker from the 1930s and 1940s whose movies Maud had read about but never seen. She had arranged to meet Samir at his apartment, for the sole reason that if she snooped around a little, she'd have a clearer idea of who he was.

When he opened his door, he was wearing an eye patch.

"Ahoy there, matey," she said. Although it wasn't what she would have expected of him, she thought he must be kidding around. "Topscutle me bamberger."

"This isn't a joke, unfortunately," he said. "I scratched my cornea this afternoon. I was planing a table and I was too lazy to put on my goggles. I have to wear this for two days."

"Bummer," she said. "Does it hurt?"

"It hurt before I saw the eye doctor. It hurt every time I blinked. But he put something in it and now I have to keep it closed. That's what the eye patch is for."

"I always wanted to be seen in public with a pirate," she said. "I think it would be good for my image."

"Actually, I was trying to call you. I wish you had a cell phone. I'm sorry that you made the trip all the way out here, but I don't think I feel up to going out tonight."

She was disappointed, but not completely. She was also relieved. On the way over, she'd been sour-stomached with ambivalence, and now she was glad to think she could just go home.

It was hard to admit this to herself, but what he had told her the other day about his daughter had spooked her.

She sympathized with him fully: she could imagine nothing more terrible than the death of your child. But at the same time, it made her want to run from him. People whose lives have been marked by disaster seem to carry the stink of it on their bodies, and it attracts further disasters their way. Disaster may make its first entrance into your life by pure bad luck, but after that first visit, it loses its randomness. It knows your address. Lightning
always
strikes twice.

She wished she could have had a more purely "feminine" reaction to his revelation: she wished she purely sympathized, without the self-protective recoil. But there she was.

"Well I have to sit down for a minute. Mr. Kant here weighs a ton." She was rereading
The Critique of Pure Reason
, which felt like a brick in her shoulder bag. "Dude had a lot to say." She swung her bag in the air. "Also good for fending off muggers."

"I'll take your coat," he said, and when he went down the hall, she had a chance to get the lay of the land.

She had never seen a place so bare. It was as if someone had gone through it and removed everything that suggested a past, everything that suggested a spiritual or intellectual life. There were no books. She knew that he'd read a lot at one point in his life, and he
seemed
like a reader, so she assumed his books must be in the bedroom. But when she took a few steps to look into the bedroom, she saw no books there either.

There were no photographs on the walls. She had expected to find photographs of Zahra.

The only thing in his apartment that implied someone was actually living there, an individual with a personality, was the furniture. The table and chairs in the kitchen and the rocking chair in the living room were sturdy and graceful. Probably he had made them himself.

When he returned, she said, "No books."

"No books."

"That surprises me."

Samir didn't say anything. She sat on the couch.

The only thing on the living room wall was a clock, flatly functional.

"You have a clock in the living room."

He looked up at it as if he'd never noticed it before.

"It seems strange to me," she said, "but I'm not sure why it seems strange." She thought about it for a moment. "I guess I think that kind of clock belongs in the kitchen. It's a clock you expect to see in a diner or something. It's a clock from the world of work. And the kitchen is closer to the world of work than the living room."

He didn't respond.

He isn't charmed by me, she thought. My quirky musings.

He's too sad to be charmed. But he's… something.

She had an effect on him; she could feel it. She hadn't been able to feel it the first few times they'd met, during those awkward attempts at conversation at George and Celia's. But now she could feel that her presence discomfited and excited him at the same time. He was kind of tilted away from her, as if he were next in line at a limbo competition.

She felt large in his small apartment, but for the first time in her life she felt gorgeously large. She felt as if she had a large personality. She felt like a force to be reckoned with.

"Is it just vanity that makes you want to stay in?" she said. "Because if it is, you should know you look kind of dashing in that eye patch."

"I just don't feel up to it."

He was impassive; he was giving her nothing. He was a one-step-forward-two-steps-back kind of guy, and tonight he was stepping back.

She wasn't going to let him keep his guard up. "Come here for a second, will you?" she said. "Look at this." Still sitting on the couch, she put out her hand and looked at her palm as if there were something on it. He walked toward her—he looked as if he were hypnotized—and when he was standing close enough, she undid his belt buckle and unzipped his pants. "Unfinished business," she said, and pulled out his penis and took it into her mouth.

It was soft, of course, and there was a moment when she was afraid it would remain soft, which would be humiliating for both of them—if he didn't get hard she would probably have to leave, because the encounter would be too silly for their relationship to survive. But then it began to get hard, like magic, like those Sea-Monkeys she once sent away for in elementary school, using a full two weeks' allowance: "Just dip them in a glass of water and watch them grow." Except that she wasn't clipping anything into water. So this wasn't like those Sea-Monkeys at all.

She wasn't really
enjoying
this, not on a sexual level, at least. But she
was
enjoying it in some way. She was in the grip, not of desire, but of a desire to possess him.

At the Ramble the other day, before she'd looked up and seen that he was crying, there was a moment when his legs were trembling, when she felt a long tremor passing along his entire body, and she had thought, If this went on too long he could die from it; if I kept him at this peak without letting him come I could kill him. And although killing him was the last thing she wanted, it had made her feel powerful. And she wanted to get that back. She wanted to get back that moment when she had him in her mouth and he was trembling.

A friend of Maud's who'd recently broken up with a longtime boyfriend had told Maud that the boyfriend was constantly complaining that she never woke him up in the middle of the night with a blow job. Her friend was a brilliant and witty and lovely woman, and doubtless the boyfriend had loved all these things about her, but he had also wanted her to be a sexual fantasy. When she heard the story, Maud thought the guy was a pinhead, but now, with Samir's cock in her mouth, she was thinking, Why not? It would take so little, really, to play the role of a man's sexual-fantasy woman, since most men's fantasies were so crude. Maud and Samir were on the floor, somehow, and she already knew him well enough to know that he was close, and he wasn't crying, which was progress, and now his fingers were in her hair, fluting, tapping in an almost coherent way as if he were typing a letter, and then he was arching his back, and then she could feel him starting to come, something she had to brace for, the curiously unholy taste of come, here it was, but his come wasn't so bad, didn't taste quite so much like chlorine as some other men's, and he was still coming, and her thoughts had already leaped ahead to the next act, because it's one thing to give a guy a blow job and quite another to make him want you to stay around after the blow job is over.

Back in college, she had become all too familiar with this sequence: you have an hour or two of intense, soul-sharing communion in bed with a guy, and then he asks you to go home, explaining that he likes to sleep by himself. How to make sure that that didn't happen now? The perfect strategy to employ with most guys would be to get out of bed as soon as he comes, grab a couple of brews from the fridge, and ask if he'd mind if you turned on the hockey game. But Samir didn't have any brews in the fridge, and she was sure he didn't give a damn about the hockey game. The wisest thing, she thought, might be to leave without saying a word: the element of surprise; the element of keep-him-guessing; the strategy of keep-him-wanting-more. But that would be ignoble—cowardice teased up into a style. Something more active was called for here, even if it was more of a risk.