Breakable You (23 page)

Patrick shook his head and laughed. "Jesus. With the amount of money they're spending here, they could feed Ethiopia."

He seemed solid, substantial, sure of his values. He was perhaps the one person she knew who, if offered a day's work as an extra in this production, whatever it was, would have no interest. Everyone else she knew would find it hard to pass up the chance to get a close look at Angelina Jolie. Including herself.

They walked down to MacDougal and finally stopped at the Caffe Dante. It was crowded. Two girls in front of them on line kept calling everything "awesome." Patrick looked amused. Not condescending, not uncharitable, but amused.

She was reminded of an old TV series about a cop from Texas or Nebraska or somewhere who comes to New York to solve a case and ends up staying. Marching around in his cowboy boots and ten-gallon hat: the hick who keeps outsmarting all the city slickers.

After their coffee came, Patrick said, "I saw Kate's show last night."

"Kate's show?"

"The reason I'm here right now? Kate? My daughter?"

"That's right. I forgot about the show. How was it?"

"I understood about two percent of what she was getting at. Even after she explained it to me. But I was amazed. I know she's my daughter, so I might not be very objective, but I really think she's brilliant. She made these things… they look like half trees, half people. I don't know if I've ever seen anything like them before. The only thing I can compare them to is—well, Diana and I went to Florence a few years ago, and one museum has these unfinished sculptures by Michelangelo,
The Slaves
, where the people seem like they're emerging from rocks, or getting swallowed up by the rocks." He stopped and smiled at himself. "Yes, friends, take it from me. My daughter and Michelangelo."

Eleanor looked down into her coffee cup, purely because she wanted a minute to savor this. This was a father who wanted his children to succeed. He wasn't competing with them. She'd almost forgotten that this was the way it was supposed to be.

She asked him what his other daughter was like.

"Maggie? She's like a bomb. She'll say anything, anywhere, anytime. She's a one-girl truth patrol."

He told a few stories about his one-girl truth patrol. He was proud of her. Eleanor didn't want to ask about Diana, but she had a feeling that he was proud of her too.

I'm a fool, she thought.

After she'd seen Patrick in December, when she went back to her apartment and wrote about her memories of him, she'd admitted to herself that if she were sent back to her youth and once again given the choice between Adam or Patrick, she would once again choose Adam—not because of the man but because of the life. She had chosen Adam because she knew he could introduce her to a larger world, and she would choose him again for the same reason.

But now she wondered about this. What
was
the larger world? Adam's idea of the larger world was… what? Parties. Fame. Getting ahead. Dreaming of ways to triumph over his rivals.

Patrick was a born appreciator. He used to make her feel important, and he still did. He used to make her feel interesting, and he still did. She couldn't regret the choices she made, because the choices she made had brought her children into the world. But she wondered what she herself might have become if she'd chosen him.

"I feel lucky that you called me last fall," she said.

He smiled oddly.

"What?" she said.

"It wasn't entirely luck."

"How's that?"

"When Vivian was back in Portland last year to close up her mother's house, I ran into her. I asked her about you, of course, and she told me you were free. I asked her for your number. I said I wasn't even sure you'd remember me, with your big-city life. She said she thought you probably would."

Vivian had never even hinted at this. Eleanor was amazed by her friend's capacity for deception. But, really, it was just like her. The secret romantic, working behind the scenes to bring Eleanor together with the man who, in Vivian's eyes, she should have been with in the first place.

"Vivian always liked you," Eleanor said.

After they had coffee they walked downtown, toward his hotel. "When you first moved here," Patrick said, "I'd sometimes go to the photography section of the bookstore and look at books about New York. I used to imagine you on every street."

He turned and put his hands on her shoulders and kissed her, and she put her arms around him, trying to remember the last time she had kissed anyone but Adam. The last time she'd kissed anyone but Adam, she realized, was when she had last kissed Patrick.

She put her head in his jacket, half as a coy show of affection, half to slow things down.

"And what's happening with Diana?"

"It's still the same."

"You're together, you're not together, you're together?"

"That's about it."

He put his arm around her waist and they continued walking.

"I don't think that will work for me, Patrick."

He nodded. He looked as if he already knew this.

"I'm not asking you to leave her. All I'm saying is that I don't want to be the other woman."

"I respect that."

"You do?"

"It's not like I haven't been thinking about it. My conscience has been trying to tell me more or less the same thing."

"But you weren't listening?"

"I wanted to kiss you. So I told my conscience to take a hike."

They were walking through Soho. Young people on parade. Most of them, to Eleanor's eye, looked slightly manic.

It's good, she thought, not to be young.

"I don't know if Diana and I can split up while Maggie's still living at home. I don't want to be seeing my daughter at a pizza parlor once a week."

She could understand that. She was glad that it mattered to him.

"Is there any chance that you and Diana can work it out?"

"I don't think so. We could stay together. We could accomplish that. But we've been having the same fights for the last thirty years. I think both of us are ready for different fights."

They reached his hotel too soon.

"I won't ask you to come up," he said. "I think you might be the most moral person I've ever known."

"I hope not," she said.

When she got back to her apartment, she opened her notebook and began to write.

It wasn't an abstract sense of morality that had made her tell Patrick that she couldn't see him if he was still with Diana. It was something more specific than that.

Eleanor had been continuing to write about her old life. During the last few weeks, she'd been writing about the period when she met Patrick.

It was disturbing to revisit those days.

Eleanor's sister met Patrick before Eleanor did. He and Joanna were in an antiwar group together. Eleanor could still remember the way Joanna talked about him: smiling with an unselfconscious radiance, bringing up things he'd said with an air that would have made you think she was quoting George Bernard Shaw.

When Eleanor met him, she wondered whether she would have found him attractive at all if Joanna hadn't advertised his merits beforehand. Eleanor, in her twenties, was a kind of snob—she only liked smart people—and she might have mistaken his deliberateness for a lack of intelligence, his solidity for an absence of fire.

One day he and Joanna were supposed to go over a statement the group was putting out, but when he showed up in the evening, Joanna was still at work. Eleanor invited him to wait for a while on their porch and brought out a pitcher of iced tea and two glasses, and they talked until it got dark, and finally he had to leave, and she never quite told him that Joanna had called that afternoon to say that she wouldn't be able to make it home until midnight.

She still had a clear memory of sitting on the porch with him—although in truth, her picture of herself was clearer than her picture of him. She was barefoot and wearing a sleeveless sundress; she set down his glass on a table next to one of the wicker chairs and sat across from him on the swing seat; and, because this is the kind of thing you know about yourself when you're twenty-one, she knew just how nice her legs looked as she kept lightly, slightly swinging, pushing herself casually off the floor.

When she and Patrick got together, a week or two after that, Joanna acted as if she were happy for them. Joanna had never quite admitted that she was interested in him. She was such an innocent that it was conceivable that she hadn't admitted it to herself.

Joanna and Patrick were both straightforward people—honest, commonsensical, free of guile. Free, even, of irony. They might have been perfectly matched. And Eleanor had stepped between them, for no reason, really, other than that she could. And had left him shortly afterward for a man she thought could give her a more exciting life.

The taking of Patrick. If Joanna had lived, it might have been just one contest in a long and mostly loving rivalry, something not of much importance in the scheme of things. But because Joanna had died that same year, it had been the last thing that passed between them, and in Eleanor's mind the two events, the taking of the man and the death of the sister, were twisted together.

Over these past few decades, Eleanor had grown comfortable with an idea of herself as a virtuous woman: a forgiving wife, a patient mother, a caring therapist. Revisiting the past had reminded her that she had once been a different creature. The discovery wasn't entirely unwelcome: it isn't a bad thing to remember that you have some wildness in you, that not every inch of your soul is honorable and responsible and presentable and tamped and tamed. But at the same time, remembering how she'd taken Patrick away from one woman, she couldn't give herself permission to take him away from another.

Maud let herself into Samir's apartment. She could hear him snoring from the front hall.

A grown man who is sleeping is almost always an unlovely thing. Even if you love him. There's something heavy and dull about the sleeping body of a grown man, something strangled and death-gripped about the sounds he makes. And Samir slept more charmlessly than most. Over the past few months, he had become happier than he thought he could be—he had told her this, and she believed it—but whenever she watched him sleeping, she thought that unhappiness was the root condition of his soul.

She felt as if she were about to drop a bomb on his life.

She should probably just leave, without waking him. Leave, schedule an abortion, never tell him. And then they could go on as they'd been going, getting to know each other slowly.

Let him live, she thought. He doesn't need this. The love of his life was his daughter. His mourning is his home. Don't bring someone new into his life.

He stirred and opened his eyes.

"Good morning," he said. "Come to bed."

She didn't think it would be fair to get into bed. She wanted to tell him what was happening, and it wouldn't be fair to tell him while they were making love, or just after.

She didn't move.

He sat up.

"Are you all right?"

He still often did his best to seem like an insensitive man, but he was incapable of hiding who he really was. He was astonishingly attuned to her.

"Maybe we should take a walk," she said.

After she told him, he had to force himself to keep walking normally.
Lift this leg. Then that leg
.

This was one of those soul-making moments that come very seldom in life. What they did and said in the next hour would go a long way in determining not only what the two of them were to each other, but what the two of them were. It's probably true that you're forging your own character during every minute of every day, with every decision you make; but there are some moments in which this is much more clear than in others.

She hadn't yet told him what she wanted, and he had no clue. Nor did he have a clue what he wanted himself.

It was Saturday morning. It must have been about six o'clock. The streets were quiet. They walked to the Promenade, passing without comment the spot where he had kissed her on that first night.

This moment might have been beautiful. If her news had excited them both, rather than confused them, this moment, as they walked down the Promenade while the city began to come to life across the river, might have seemed holy.

But the moment did not feel holy. He had a bad cold, and he felt sluggish and awkward, and he didn't know what he wanted, and
Zahra Zahra Zahra
.

"Don't worry," he said. "We'll figure this out."

"We will?" she said. "Is there a 'we' here?" she said.

He could say,
Come to think of it, there isn't
. In asking him the question, she was opening a door, and he wanted nothing more than to walk through it, out of her life, out of the land of
we
and
ours
and
us
.

"Of course there's a 'we' here," he said.

He didn't know if he believed this but he had to say it. He didn't know what he believed.

But the thing to do was to try to react with his kindest impulses and then wait until later to figure out what he really thought and what he really wanted.

He brushed a strand of hair away from her eyes.

"Isn't there?"

"Of course there's a 'we' here," he said. He brushed a strand of hair away from her eyes.

"Isn't there?"

She expected him to follow this up by saying, "Isn't we?" but of course he would never say anything as playful as this. He was not a playful man. She wasn't sure he had a sense of humor, actually. Can I be with a man who doesn't have a sense of humor?

"Maybe we should get something to eat," he said.

They walked toward a coffee shop, and she tried to think of it as walking, rather than trudging.

"I wish I hadn't spent the last couple of weeks reading Schopenhauer," she said.

"Why not?"

"He has this very persuasive way of explaining that life is hell."

"Every life?"

"Every life. He says that life consists of little more than suffering. He says that life would make sense if it
were
hell. He says that it's as if all of us are being punished for crimes that we can't remember committing."