Breakable You (26 page)

The three of them got together on a cool afternoon in March. She had suggested that they go to the Met. Ralph was waiting for her and Samir, sitting in his wheelchair, near the fountains outside the building.

Ralph looked terrible. She had seen him just a few weeks ago, and she actually wasn't sure he looked any worse; it might just have been that it had been a long time since she'd seen him in the sun. When she saw him in his apartment, amid the paintings and the sculpture and the nineteenth-century novels and the art books, his pallor never seemed out of place. Outdoors, in the bright day, he looked ghastly.

Holding up one hand to shield his eyes from the sun, Ralph smiled up at Samir. "I've heard a lot about you."

Samir just nodded. Maud wanted to brain him with her purse, and suddenly this encounter, which she'd been telling herself she shouldn't feel tense about, seemed like a test. If he flunks it, she thought, he's out. If he can't be nice to Ralph, then he's not worth keeping.

They walked slowly through the museum, and she kept trying to take her mind off her own anxiety. Ralph had no shortage of things to say—he was in his element here, and he was playing the part of the genial tour guide—but Samir remained firmly committed to silence. Maud felt herself growing perky and cheerleaderish, to keep things light. After Ralph said something about Pisarro's use of the color gray, she nodded enthusiastically, and ten seconds later realized that she was still nodding. She had a vision of herself as someone else might see her—head bobbing up and down with an inane vigor.
Maud Weller
, she thought.
The bobble-head doll. At toy stores everywhere
.

When they were ready to leave the museum, they took the closest elevator, a freight elevator with a heavily scuffed floor and gray industrial padding on the walls. When you left the museum the usual way, walking down the white stone steps on Fifth Avenue, the experience had a kind of grandeur. They had no choice but to leave the way they did—Ralph couldn't make it down the steps—and yet the dismalness of the elevator and the way it dumped them at a side entrance at the mouth of the parking garage made it feel to her as if they'd been kicked out. It was as if the museum had been a test for all three of them, and they'd failed.

They decided to get something to eat. Maud suggested a coffee shop she knew on Madison Avenue. It wasn't built with handicapped people in mind—Ralph had trouble getting through the entryway—but once they were in, the waiters courteously and efficiently cleared space around a table to give him enough room.

"I used to come here with my dad when I was in high school," Maud said. "We'd go to the museum and then we'd have a snack. The only problem was that there was this literary critic who used to eat here once in a while, and my dad couldn't stand him. So there would be a lot of glaring going on."

"What critic?" Ralph said.

"Irving Howe?" she said.

"I remember him. Why didn't your father like him?"

"He didn't like my dad's books. He gave
Daybreak
a terrible review."

"I guess that would do it."

Samir was smirking.

"What?" she said.

"Irving Howe. I didn't like him either."

"Did you know him?" Maud said.

"No. I mean I didn't like his work. I don't know anything about his literary criticism, but I never liked his political things."

"Why not?"

"He wrote a lot about the Middle East. And… how shall I put it? He was not a friend of Palestinian aspirations."

"Irving Howe?" Ralph said. "I thought he was a dove."

She saw a series of thoughts cross Samir's face. At first he looked as if he was going to say something cutting; then he looked as if he'd decided against it.

"In the American political climate, he was the kind of person who passes for a dove. Why don't we just leave it at that."

"I can understand how you might feel that way," Ralph said. "I can't say that I've ever given much thought to how our media coverage of the Middle East must look to an Arab American."

She was touched by her old friend's graciousness—by the steady friendliness he'd shown Samir all afternoon, by the way he'd remained undeterred by Samir's coldness.

But still, the afternoon had been a disaster. All she wanted to do was go home by herself.

Their food arrived. Some kind of meat things for the men, and for Maud, a grilled-cheese sandwich.

Samir had to go back to Bethesda to finish the job he'd been doing mere. While Maud talked with him about the logistics of the next few days, she noticed that Ralph was watching a baseball game on the TV that was mounted over the cash register.

"Baseball?" she said.

"Spring training."

"I didn't know you were a baseball fan."

"I'm a born-again baseball fan. I used to love baseball when I was a kid. Then I gave it up for around fifteen years. Now I've become a baseball fan again."

"Why?"

"I'm feeling so tired these days that I can't really read for more than twenty minutes at a time. And the Mets have a couple of new players who are fun to watch. I think they're going to do pretty well this year."

"Don't bet on it," Samir said. "The Mets will always break your heart."

"You too?" Maud said.

"Me too. Just in the last week or so, I've been listening to the game sometimes when I work. I used to be a fan a long time ago."

"Mets?" Ralph said.

"Yeah. In the eighties. Gooden, Strawberry, Hernandez."

"Mookie Wilson," Ralph said. "Lennie Dykstra. That was a great team."

"I bring together two of the most serious men I know," Maud said, "and the thing they have in common is baseball."

"Baseball is serious," Ralph said.

"An intellectual who likes baseball," Maud said. "How does it feel to be a cliche?"

"Feels all right," he said.

Samir and Ralph spent the next ten minutes talking about baseball. She kept uttering little noises of disapproval, but of course she was delighted that they'd found something to talk about.

Sometime in the middle of the conversation, while Samir was talking, Ralph removed a vial from his jacket and took two pills. Maud saw the label: they were painkillers. He hadn't said a word about being in pain today.

Ralph knew how much this meeting meant to her, so he was trying to put aside his own troubles and make the occasion successful. It struck her that there were many opportunities for heroism in life. You don't need to fight in a war to find out who you are.

They left the coffee shop and walked through Central Park. She and Samir took turns pushing Ralph's wheelchair. Samir and Ralph were still talking about baseball.

It was a pleasure to see Ralph and Samir warming up to each other, but a complicated pleasure. For Samir, the fact that he was watching a ball game now and again was a sign that he was returning to life, beginning to accept life's pleasures, large and small. For Ralph, it was a sign that his vitality was waning, perhaps forever.

She tried to brush this thought away in the beauty of the afternoon.

"I'm feeling awfully bored with myself these days," Arthur said.

And I'm feeling awfully bored with you too, Eleanor thought.

She had never fired a client; she had never wanted to. But now she was wondering.

"I feel so bored with myself I'm afraid Willa's going to get sick of me. I'm starting to think she's planning to dump me."

She'll have to stand in line, Eleanor thought.

But this was unprofessional.

It was difficult to listen patiently to Arthur when there was so much noise inside her own mind.

She'd violated one of her own rules by taking a phone call just five minutes before a session. She'd established this rule for herself years ago, on a day when she'd picked up the phone, had a fight with Adam, and then found herself unable to concentrate on a client.

But today she hadn't been able to help herself. She hadn't heard from Maud in a while, and she'd been concerned about her, so when her phone rang and her caller ID told her it was Maud, she hadn't been able to stop herself from picking up.

"But sometimes I feel bored with Willa too," Arthur said, "You know how they say that the thing you like about someone at the beginning is the thing that drives you nuts in the end? I used to admire Willa because she was so bouncy. So optimistic. But my boss's wife just died, and Saturday we went over to make a condolence call, and she's grinning and telling him to look on the bright side!"

Ditch the wench, Eleanor thought. Stop paying her Nordstrom's bills. Let her find the bright side of that.

She should have just cancelled this session. How could she think about Arthur when she'd just found out that Maud was pregnant?

Maud pregnant.

If the conditions were right, if Maud had the kind of security she needed, she'd be a wonderful mother.

If the conditions were wrong, Maud could really be in trouble.

And Eleanor had no idea whether the conditions were going to be right or wrong.

On the phone Maud told her that she'd thought it through, that she wanted this, that Samir was a good man.

It was impossible to feel thrilled by the fact that your daughter is going to have a child with a man whom, up until now, she hasn't even wanted you to meet.

"If she still wanted to sleep with me once in a while," Arthur said, "that would make a difference. But she doesn't. It's like she barely notices me anymore."

Huh? Eleanor thought. Did you say something?

She was angry because Maud had taken so long to tell her, and angry because, once she'd decided to tell her, she'd blurted it out like that, even though Eleanor had said that she had only a minute to talk.

Maybe Maud had timed her call precisely: maybe she didn't
want
to have more than a minute to talk.

Arthur was saying something. But what?

Eleanor wasn't sure she'd ever failed a client as miserably as she was failing Arthur now.

"And I wish I could stop wanting to have sex with her. But I can't. She's got this hot little rocket body… When I was ten, before I ever touched a girl, I was in love with this girl in my class, and I thought that the proof that it was really love was that she was the only girl I ever thought of when I jerked off. And I'm in the same situation now. I know I'm still in love with Willa because she's the only person I think about when I jerk off."

Eleanor was still trying to form a mental picture of a hot little rocket body.

She had seen Arthur only three times before today. She hadn't started to piece together his story yet.

But what was
Maud's
story? That was the question. If it had taken Maud all this time to tell her—-well, Eleanor wasn't blaming herself for being angry about it, but her task now was to empathize, to understand that Maud's inability to talk to her must mean something.

She doesn't feel comfortable with me. I should stop feeling angry and start trying to understand why.

It was two o'clock.

"We'll have to end now," she said.

"Thank you, Doctor," Arthur said, though she wasn't one. She had corrected him after their first two sessions and didn't bother to correct him now.

She only had a few minutes before she had to see her next client, Jenny Mitchell.

Eleanor drew the blinds and closed her eyes and tried to pull herself together.

Maud is pregnant.

The phrase kept repeating itself in her mind. Nothing more than that.

Eleanor heard the door of her waiting room open and close. She got up and opened the door of her office.

Jenny came in and they sat in their accustomed places. "I'm feeling like a chucklehead today," Jenny said.
The Chucklehead's Tale
, Eleanor thought. Then, with an effort, she cleared her mind, and began to listen.

Maud glanced up from her book. She realized that Samir had put his newspaper down a while ago and had been looking at her.

"What?" she said.

He smiled.

"The day I met you I tore up all my maps," he said.

He sounded as if he was quoting something.

"Beg pardon?" she said.

"It's a line from a poem I read in high school."

"You read poetry in high school?"

He'd never told her anything about high school. She'd always pictured his high school self as grimly serious—a boy with no time for the arts.

"I never read a word of it until tenth grade, and then for a year or two I hardly read anything else."

"What made you change?"

"It was that poem, actually. I still remember the moment when I read it. I was in the library. The Sparta public library. I was writing a history paper about Palestine, and I wanted to use an epigraph from a Palestinian poet named Mahmoud Darwish. Epigram? Epigraph? Anyway, I went to the poetry section, for the first time in my life, and found a book of Arabic poetry, and I happened to open it to a poem by Nizar Qabbani. It was about a poet whose life has been overturned by love."

"And that one poem turned you into a poetry reader?"

"It did more than that. I think it changed my life. My parents wanted me to be an engineer, and I never really questioned it. It was practical. But I read the poem—I think it was just called 'Poems'—and then I read another, and then another. I think I spent the whole day in the poetry section, and everything seemed different by the time I left. I didn't think I was going to be a poet, but I knew I wasn't going to be an engineer."

She had so many questions that she had no idea which to ask first. She wanted to know how this had led to a political science degree and a life that was mainly devoted to politics. She wanted to know if he ever thought about going back to a job that involved working with words. She wanted to know what his parents thought about his choices.

She decided not to ask any of these questions. She had time enough to find out everything she wanted to know.

"What was that line again?" she said.

"'The day I met you I tore up all my maps.'"

He was looking at her steadily.

"I can still remember what I was thinking when I read that line," he said. "I remember wondering if love was really like that. I remember wondering if I could ever feel that way about anyone."