Breakable You (20 page)

"Why wouldn't it be smart?"

She could barely get the words out of her mouth. She looked like a stunned child.

"Well, first of all, I very much doubt whether anyone would want to publish it. I could send it to Paula Cohen. I know she was never Izzy's editor, but she admired him, and she might be interested in looking at it for sentimental reasons. But no one publishes anything for sentimental reasons, not anymore. Publishing has become a business and nothing but a business, even for someone like Paula."

"But you could show it to her?"

"I could. I could. But my concern is that, even if, by some miracle, someone did publish it, it wouldn't do anything to help Izzy's reputation. I think it would have the opposite effect."

"Why is that? Why would another book hurt his reputation? It's a great book. It's vintage Izzy."

He smiled in a way that he hoped looked rueful, warm, and knowing. "You could say it's vintage Izzy. You could say that. But that isn't the way the critics will see it. They'll see it as Izzy repeating himself. You know how much Izzy always added to the last draft. Who knows what he could have done with this if he'd had another two years. He might have turned it into a wonderful book. It certainly has the seeds of a wonderful book inside it. But as it is…" He gestured at the manuscript in a helpless, resigned way.

"Didn't you think parts of it were beautiful? Didn't you think the beginning was fantastic, with the way they meet on the Brooklyn Bridge? And what about the ending? Didn't you think the ending was special? It was so filled with hope. Real, genuine hope, after everything that had happened with those people—when you thought they had no hope left at all."

"I did think parts of it were beautiful, Ruth. But… trust me. You're reading it with the eyes of love. I read it with the eyes of love myself. You know that. But part of my responsibility—to Izzy and to you—was also to read it with the eyes of critical judgment. And, Ruth, I need to say it plainly. Readers who don't already know Izzy, who don't love Izzy, will not be moved by this book."

Ruth was crying now, full force. An inarticulate sound escaped her. She picked up her napkin and hid her face and continued to cry.

Adam was glad she was hiding her face. Most women, he thought, look so foolish when they cry. Eleanor always looked like a melon.

But he had to hand it to Ruth: she had remarkable powers of resilience. By the time she took the napkin away from her face, she had collected herself. She was still snuffling, but she seemed composed.

"I thought he really got it this time," she said. "But then again, I guess I thought everything he wrote was a work of genius."

"Izzy was a wonderful writer," Adam said. "And he couldn't have been the wonderful writer that he was if you hadn't supported him so beautifully. He couldn't have done what he did if you hadn't believed in him."

"I did support him," she said. "I did believe in him."

"I know you did," he said. "It made him strong."

He pushed the plate of crullers toward her, but of course she didn't touch it. When women are suffering, they can't even look at food. This is the main difference between the sexes, he thought. A man can always chow down.

It was time for gentle humor, Adam thought. Fond and loving reminiscence.

Adam reminded her of the time Izzy had asked her to swear to him that she considered him a better writer than Tolstoy. She laughed, and told an Izzy story of her own, and for the next ten or fifteen minutes they shared memories of him, and Adam's lies floated lightly in the air, dispersing now, and she would never know that he had lied to her.

He was at peace with what he had done. He had never claimed to be a good man. He had never claimed to put the needs of others over his own.

For a few days, after he had been informed that he had written nothing major in decades, he had considered destroying Izzy's manuscript. But he decided not to. He cared too much about literature for that. He had loved Izzy, but now he was gone, so there was no point in talking about treating him well, but he also loved literature, which was not yet gone, and he wanted to preserve this sparkling thing that his friend had brought into being. He would put it among his papers, and when he too was dead, it would be discovered, and if posterity judged that Izzy was the better writer of the two of them, so be it.

As for Ruth, it was a pity that he needed to disappoint her, but it couldn't be helped. And he was going to try to be good to her in another way.

"I've also been looking through his letters, Ruth. And I think they really are remarkable. I think I might be able to arrange to have them published. And, who knows? It could lead to a rediscovery of his work. Unless you have any objection, I'd like to start looking into it right away."

"No. Of course I have no objection. I'd love that."

He intended to see this through. If Jeffrey wasn't interested in editing the letters, he would find someone else to do it. He might even take on the project himself. And in that way, Ruth could have her happy ending. She could die believing that her husband's work had a chance, at least, to survive.

Ruth seemed to have recovered already. He was relieved about this. He hadn't done her any permanent harm. They talked for a few more minutes, and then he said he had to go. At the door, he kissed her on the cheek, noting with distaste how she had let her cheek become faintly, whitely hairy, and promised to see her again soon. As the elevator doors closed, he wondered whether he'd see her again at all.

After Adam left, Ruth picked up the dishes and the coffee cups and the utensils and put them in the dishwasher. She wiped the table clean with a sponge. She thought about turning the radio on, but decided not to. She worked in silence.

Adam's verdict had left her deeply sad. When she was reading the novel, she'd felt as if Izzy had laid out the truth of their lives, her life and his, rendered it indelibly, immortalized it. And it had made her feel less afraid of dying. She had felt as if she could shed her body now with no regrets, knowing that the two of them would live forever in the pages he had written, in the full strong bloom of their love.

It was shattering to realize that this wouldn't happen. No one would read these pages; no one would be nourished by the beauty of what she and Izzy had had.

It never occurred to her that Adam might not have been telling her the truth. It had been a long time since she'd considered him a good man, but she knew that he loved Izzy—his love for his old friend was one of the few indisputably good things about him.

She decided that she would call Paula Cohen herself. She didn't want to bother Adam any more by asking him to make the call for her. Paula had always liked Izzy, and she'd probably be happy to take a look at it. But Ruth believed she already knew what she'd say. If Adam thought that she was deluding herself about the value of this book, he was probably right.

She washed her face and brushed her teeth and changed into her nightgown and got into bed. Izzy had felt so present, so close, for weeks now, but Adam's verdict on the book had pushed him back into the dark. It was as if he had come back into her life for a few days, and now she had to let go of him all over again.

She closed her eyes and thought about the dream she'd had a few nights earlier. Izzy had been in the dream, but it had broken off before she'd had the chance to talk with him.

She was meeting him in a park. She had come with a gift. In the morning she could no longer remember what the gift was; all she could remember was that she was holding it in a brightly wrapped box. Izzy was walking toward her from across the park. He was young, as young and striking and wild-looking as he was when she'd first known him. But she herself was her true age, which made her more than twice as old as the young Izzy who was making his way toward her.

He was still on the other side of the park, and she wasn't sure how clearly he could see her. She wasn't sure if he could see that she was old. She stood there waiting for him, nervously clutching her gift, wondering whether he could still love her.

Eleanor was in Maud's room, writing. The phone rang. She let the machine answer, and then she heard the old unmistakable voice.

"Ellie. It's Patrick."

When he spoke, he always sounded as if he had a pebble in his mouth. He spoke in a measured way that made you think each word cost him dearly.

He didn't say anything else. He was thinking.

The answering machine, concluding from his silence that he was no longer there, cut him off.

A few minutes later, he called back, but he didn't say anything.

The same thing happened a minute after that.

He lived in a simpler world than she did, a more naive world. How could he not know that when you call again and again like this, repeatedly engaging an answering machine, there's a better than even chance that the person you're calling is home, listening to you make a fool of yourself?

Then he called again and began speaking.

She remained at her desk. She felt no impulse to pick up the phone.

A few months ago, when she had refrained from taking his calls, she had done so because she didn't have anything going on in her life. She was afraid that if she started talking to him again, he would quickly become, in the little circus of her life, the main attraction. Now she refrained from taking his call only because she was immersed in what she was doing.

"I'm going to be in the city again soon," Patrick said. He told her when. "I'd love to see you."

She reached for her pocket calendar and circled the date.

The machine cut him off again before he had a chance to say good-bye, and she went back to the thing she was trying to write.

If she was immersed in her writing, it was partly because of the afternoon she'd spent with him. Their meeting had shaken something loose in her. It had made her past more urgent, less simple, and from that day to this, she had spent almost every evening in Maud's old room, writing about the world she had grown up in.

When she was young, she'd begun a novel about her family, but she'd stalled out, not too long after she met Adam. Now she was returning to the subject, almost forty years later. Maybe it was the only story she had to tell. But she wasn't trying to write it as fiction anymore. All she wanted to do was put something of her past down on paper.

It had been strange, during the past weeks, to be spending part of every day with the ghostly presences of her parents and her sister. To have these people who were long dead as her companions, her familiars.

It was painful to experience Joanna anew, to remember fully what the loss of Joanna had meant for her. When Joanna was alive, Eleanor had always felt protected, both because her sister took it upon herself to protect her and because her sister had gone through every experience first, so that every experience, no matter how scary, had been domesticated and demythologized by the time it was Eleanor's turn to attempt it. Joanna had fought her way through every thicket, and when Eleanor followed, the branches had been pushed back and the path was clear.

Although Joanna was frozen in her youth, Eleanor still thought of her as the older sister. Twenty-seven-year-old Joanna still seemed older than fifty-nine-year-old Eleanor, and if Joanna were to reappear today, Eleanor would still look up to her.

Sometimes, in writing and thinking about her sister, Eleanor felt as if she had found the key to her own loneliness. She had been separated from her other half. Experiencing things when Joanna was alive had been like experiencing them twice, since Joanna was always there, counselor and co-conspirator, to think them over with. Eleanor could almost believe that the loss of Joanna was the reason that she herself moved so slowly through life, slow to choose, slow to change. She had to think things over before she acted, think things over for an inordinately long time, because when she was young she'd always had her sister there to help her size everything up and plan everything out.

Remembering the night of the day she died. Remembering the phone call. Joanna had died in the morning, and that night Eleanor had gone into Joanna's apartment and sat amid her things and felt overcome by the thought that she was still living in a day in which Joanna had been alive, and that she never again would be living in a day in which her sister had been alive.

She had slept on Joanna's bed that night. She had lain down there just for a moment—she had felt sure that she wouldn't be able to sleep that night. But she did sleep, and she woke up in the morning, astonished, into a day that her sister would not see. How had she let the previous day go so easily? Simply by waking up into this new day, Eleanor thought, she had failed her sister.

She had sat up in her sister's bed and moaned like an animal. It wasn't something that she chose to do to relieve her grief; it was just something that came out of her, that poured out. It was like vomiting. Or no, it wasn't like vomiting: it was like something being born from her. It was as if she were giving birth to her sister's death.

Hasn't done much lately.

The phrase was still worming around in Adam's brain. Because he knew it was true.

Adam still sat down to write every day of his life. He had always been guided by a private gospel of productivity: amid all the distractions, all the parties, all the traveling, he had always sat down and written his one good page a day. Sometimes it took fifteen minutes, sometimes it took five hours; he wrote the page until he got it right and then he moved on. He might revise the page a hundred times on the day he wrote it, but he never revised it again. This was easy for him because he always had an outline for his books before he began them, and he never deviated from it. He didn't know any other writers of "literary" fiction who worked by this method: most of them strained and stressed and wrote very rough drafts of their novels and then started over from the beginning, often with a new conception of what the novels were about, and in that anguished, stumbling way, every three or four or five or six years or so, managed to complete a book. The only writers Adam had met who worked in the same brisk, efficient way that he did were people who wrote mysteries and thrillers. When you unshackle yourself from a superstitious reverence for the mysterious god named Literature, you can get a lot of work done.