Breakable You (28 page)

It was a gorgeous day at the end of March. The river was so blue it seemed to be breathing.

"Spring is screaming its bloody head off," Maud said.

Maud was moving in an odd way, sort of dragging the left half of her body along. If Maud had been older, Eleanor would have wondered whether she'd had a stroke. But she knew that this was
not
a stroke, just a peculiar physical manifestation of her grief.

Grief is like an artist, immersed in the particular, transforming each of us in a different way.

Eleanor felt terrible about the boy—she couldn't help thinking of Samir as the boy—but the weight of her concern fell entirely on her daughter.

She hadn't yet asked Maud about her pregnancy. If Eleanor hadn't had three grandchildren, she might have had mixed feelings, but as it was, what she wanted was for the pregnancy to go away. Making it through the brutal seasons of mourning would be hard enough. Maud didn't need the burden of a child.

When they got to her apartment, Eleanor made tea. Maud sat at the kitchen table, mashing her tea bag with her spoon until it broke and deposited clumps of wet leaves on the table.

"Poof," she said. "Just like that."

Eleanor put a loaf of coffee cake in front of Maud, though the chances that she'd have a slice were roughly equivalent to… Eleanor couldn't finish the thought.

"How can it be?" Maud said.

"I don't know," Eleanor said.

"I feel so juvenile. I've been studying philosophy for more than ten years, and reading about the meaning of mortality—reading everybody's opinion from Plato to Camus—and now he's dead and
I just don't understand it
. He had such a good mind. All those thoughts in his head—where can they
be
? How can they just vanish?"

"It's not juvenile," Eleanor said.

She wanted to put her hand on Maud's but she didn't know if Maud would welcome that. Maud didn't always like to be touched.

Eleanor took the risk—small risk—and did it anyway. Maud smiled, but her smile was strained, and in a minute she said she needed sugar, and got up to get the sugar bowl from the cabinet, and perhaps the point of all of it had been to free her hand.

She sat back down.

"What happens next?" Maud said.

"What happens next," Eleanor said, "is that you live. You go on."

"I go on," Maud said. "Why is that again? Why is it a good thing to go on?"

Stay calm
, Eleanor thought.
Breathe
.

She needed to resist the impulse to lecture her daughter on the goodness of life. No lectures.

Can
she be thinking about suicide? My Maud?

Why is it a good thing to go on
? Eleanor was so fearful that she couldn't think of a response. Maud didn't seem to expect one.

"You can stay here tonight, if you like," Eleanor said.

"Really?"

"Of course. Not just tonight. You can stay as long as you want to."

"Wouldn't I get in the way of your love life?"

Maud evidently meant mis as a joke. The idea of Eleanor's having a love life was funny.

Which offended Eleanor slightly.

She found it odd that she could be irritated at her daughter for an offhand joke just hours after they'd buried her daughter's boyfriend.

Maud drifted into the living room and turned on the TV. Eleanor followed her.

Dr. Phil was laying down the law to a shamefaced couple. "Something's wrong here," he said. "There's something wrong with this picture."

"What am I going to do?" Maud said.

Eleanor wished that she could step between Maud and grief; that she could ward off its blows. But this of course was impossible. She could wrap Maud in her arms, if Maud allowed it, and hold her with all the strength she had, but it wouldn't do any good. The thing that might destroy Maud was inside her.

"You're going to mourn for him, for a long time, maybe forever. And you're going to honor him, by continuing to be the strong, brilliant, thoughtful, loving, curious, sensitive woman he fell in love with."

"I guess that's one possibility," Maud said.

Adam sat beside Eleanor at the funeral. He found it comforting to be near her. He hadn't known anything about Samir—hadn't even known that Maud was seeing anyone—but Eleanor had filled him in when they'd talked on the phone. It had shaken him to learn that Maud's boyfriend had died, and it had shaken him to learn that Maud was pregnant.

Neither Eleanor nor Maud invited him to spend time with them after the funeral, so he understood that his presence was not desired.

He thought of going to the gym, but decided against it. Instead, he just went home.

For an hour or two, Adam forgot himself. For an hour or two, he forgot to think about the fate of his forthcoming book, about the awards he was hoping to win, about the question of when he might have actual sex with Thea again, as opposed to another of the cock-teasing sessions she so enjoyed—he forgot about most of the things that concerned him during the course
of
a typical day.

The only photograph on display in his apartment was one of Thea. He looked in his files until he found a few photographs of his family.

He found one of Maud at the age of eight or nine. She was in a sailboat with her brothers, screaming with a kind of delighted terror as it tipped.

She had always been the most ingenuous of his children. The most vulnerable, and yet the most forgiving. It had always been so easy to make her happy.

Maud couldn't seem to get warm. In the days since Samir's death, the temperature hadn't fallen below seventy degrees, but she was always freezing. She got her winter blankets out from the closet, and she slept under three of them and kept a portable heater at the foot of the bed, but it didn't really help.

A few years ago, Maud had told a friend that she didn't know what loneliness was. As long as she had her books, her philosopher companions, she never felt alone. Now she was discovering what loneliness was.

Maybe she was lonelier than she might have been. Maybe she wanted to be lonely. Her friends kept calling, asking to see her, but she preferred to be alone, because when she was alone she could entertain the fantasy that Samir was with her.

Nothing made sense. Because just one moment had gone wrong, Samir was gone, and would be gone forever. If one moment on the highway had been different, the two of them might have grown old together.

He hadn't kept a diary. He hadn't even sent her any e-mails. There was nothing of him to hold on to.

She woke up every morning feeling miserable before she remembered why.

His death threw its pale light back on everything they had gone through. It was as if they had known at every moment that he was going to die, and had coupled with such intensity because of that knowledge. But she knew it wasn't true.

How could this be happening?

Would killing herself be a good solution?

In death, he seemed so tender, so vulnerable, so exposed. She pictured him as trapped somewhere. He wanted to be with her. He wanted to get across to the other side. But he couldn't. He was being held back. They were holding him back. He seemed so weak in death, so sad.

Maybe the reason she didn't want to see her friends was that she was angry at them. She knew that they genuinely felt for her, but she also knew that they could feel for her only in flashes. How could it be otherwise? She knew that even Ralph, her dearest friend, was thinking of her only sometimes. His life was continuing on its course, with its own pleasures and trials. Ralph was still going to museums, still ordering obscure foreign movies from Netflix, still worrying about the decline of his physical powers.

There
was
one person who, she was sure, was living almost hourly with her pain, feeling it almost as strongly as she was. Her mother, of course. But that was a problem too. She didn't
want
her mother to be living inside her head like this. It had been a long hard labor, taking up all of her teen years and most of her twenties, to get her mother
out of
her head, a labor that had succeeded only after she'd gone in a direction, intellectually, where her mother didn't have the time or energy to follow. But now she had been stripped of her thinking self. She was only her unhappiness; and her mother could intuit every nuance of it, every ache.

After a week she went back to work and taught her classes again and didn't tell her students anything about what she'd been through. She didn't want their sympathy. The classroom was a place where she could escape from her grief for a few hours a day.

It was a relief to spend time in the company of people who didn't particularly care about her. She suspected that some of her students had heard about Samir's death, but no one said anything, and if she'd changed at all, in her appearance or her manner, she didn't think that any of them had noticed it. College students are not the most perceptive tribe. There's so much stirring and breaking and peaking in their own lives that it's hard for them to notice other people.

But the classroom was not solely a place of escape. It was also, as it always had been, a place where she could talk about the things that mattered most. Shortly after she returned to work, she did a week on Albert Camus with her class. Usually, when she taught Camus, she taught
The Rebel
, his book about social change, violence, means and ends. But this year she decided
to
teach
The Myth of Sisyphus
, his argument against religious belief. Camus urges us to find the courage to admit that the universe is indifferent to our fate. Sisyphus is the hero of the book—a Sisyphus who doesn't delude himself with the belief that he'll succeed in pushing the rock to the top of the hill. Condemned to his task and refusing to deceive himself about its outcome, he gives himself to it with a sort of joyful scorn.

This book had never meant much to her before, because she'd always taken the nonexistence of God for granted. But suddenly it meant a lot to her, because for the first time in her life, she felt tempted. Even against her will, she kept searching for reasons to believe that something of Samir had lived on.

She'd lost ten pounds in the week following his death, and men were looking at her on the street in a new way. They had always looked—men always look—but now they looked longer. The misery makeover plan.

She forced herself to start eating again. While she tried to figure out what to do about her pregnancy, it was better to eat than to starve.

She had been pregnant for eight weeks. If she was going to have an abortion, she would need to have it soon.

She was doing everything she could to keep her mother at arm's length, but it was difficult. It was like a full-time job. Whenever she saw her mother or spoke to her or sent her an e-mail, she tried to be vaguely cheerful. She didn't want to show her mother that she was despondent, but she didn't want to try to seem
too
cheerful, because her mother would have seen through that.

Eleanor called on a Saturday night when Maud was reading and weeping.

"How are you?" her mother said.

"I'm okay."

"What does that mean?"

"I don't know."

"What have you been up to?"

"Teaching. Reading. Watching TV."

"Have you been seeing your friends?"

Like many of her mother's questions, this posed a paradox. If Maud were to tell her that she hadn't been, her mother would get even more worried than she was already, and would want to come over. If Maud were to tell her that she
had
, her mother would feel excluded, and would want to come over.

Maud gave her an answer that was as vague as she could make it, and somehow it worked. Her mother went on to the next subject.

"What else have you been up to?" she said.

Which, thought Maud, meant,
Have you made an appointment for an abortion yet
?

Her mother had actually been very tactful—she'd asked about the pregnancy a few times, but, in keeping with her habit of not giving unsolicited advice, she had given no advice, because Maud hadn't solicited any.

But Maud could feel the pressure of her concern, the pressure of her wanting to know.

Sometimes she felt as if her little apartment were under siege. It was as if her mother were some vast creature, as unfightable as fog, surrounding Maud's building, sniffing at the windows, nosing at the locks, searching for a way in.

It's sad when the people who love you are the people you have to ward off.

Eleanor called Adam and they made an appointment to get together for lunch. They met on neutral ground, at an outdoor cafe on Broadway and 112th. She didn't want him back in her apartment and there was no way she would ever set foot in his.

"How's she doing?" Adam said.

"I don't know. It's hard for me to tell," she said. "We need to strategize. I need your help."

"Tell me what I can do."

"You can help her with money," she said. As soon as she said this, she wished she hadn't led with it. Nothing about him visibly changed, but she felt him harden. "If she needs it," she added.

Each of them ordered a drink, though it was barely noon.

"I'm so afraid that she's going to go under again," she said.

"She's been okay for years now," Adam said.

This was true, but for Eleanor, Maud's last breakdown felt like it had happened yesterday.

Adam seemed impatient, and Eleanor felt like a fool. She had thought it would be comforting to get together with him and share her worries about Maud. At Samir's funeral, Adam had seemed positively human, and Eleanor had thought that the shock
of
his daughter's sadness might have jarred something loose in him.

"Would it have bothered you if Maud had ended up marrying an Arab?" Adam said.

He was wearing a conspiratorial smile. She'd actually wondered about that question herself, but she didn't want to be his co-conspirator.

"No. Why? Would it have bothered you?"

"Of course it would've."

"Why 'of course'?"