Breakable You (3 page)

That was that, she'd thought, but a few weeks later, when her apartment was being repainted, George and Celia had given her their key and told her that she could use their place as a study if she wanted to, and one afternoon she ran into Sam there. She'd never been attracted to a man who was shorter than she was, but she was attracted to him instantly: his compact, tense, wiry body, the play of the muscles of his arms as he sanded down the crib that he'd built. She tried to talk to him, but he answered in monosyllables. His distance made him even more desirable, and she started showing up two or three afternoons a week—ostensibly to study, but really just to see him—and although he never warmed up to her, hardly ever even smiled, she kept talking to him, stimulated by the challenge, and finally asked him out to dinner, and he, though without much enthusiasm, had said yes. And here they were.

Well, obviously it had all been a mistake. She should have left him alone.

His soup and her salad arrived.

"Well, we made it," Maud said.

"We did."

"Maybe we can try having a conversation. Maybe it would work."

"Stranger things have happened," he said.

"Okay. Let's think of a topic. What did you do today?"

"Today, I finished making a set of kitchen cabinets for a young couple in Manhattan."

"Okay, that's good. That's a start. Did you like making the cabinets?"

"I would have liked it if I'd been alone. But unfortunately, there was the couple."

"What was wrong with the couple?"

"The two of them had very different ideas about kitchen cabinets. They each had a vision."

"That must happen a lot."

"It does. Sometimes I feel like a carpenter, and sometimes I feel like a marriage counselor."

He seemed to be loosening up.

"I can't quite see you as a marriage counselor," she said. "Samuel."

She'd used the formal version of the name just to be playful.

"It isn't Samuel, actually. It's Samir."

"Really? Samir? That's beautiful."

"Thank you."

"Why don't you use it? Why do you Samify yourself?"

"I don't. I only Samified myself for a few years, in college. I was trying to become a typical American. That's what I was calling myself when I met George and Celia. The people I know from college call me Sam; everybody else calls me Samir."

This was more information than he'd volunteered during all the encounters she'd had with him before. He was opening the door to her, a tiny bit.

"Maud is a good strong name," he said.

"I'd like to call you Samir, if that's all right with you," she said.

He didn't say anything, and his expression seemed to indicate that he didn't give a damn what she called him, and the flicker of good feeling from a moment ago was gone.

The waitress returned with their main dishes and said, "Can I get you guys another drink?" After she left, Maud said, "It would be nice if just once you could go to a restaurant where the waiters didn't address people as 'You guys.'"

"That's the kind of thing my ex-wife used to say. It used to drive her nuts."

His ex-wife.

Why hadn't George and Celia told her about this?

"I don't think I've heard you had a wife." Of course I haven't heard, and of course he knows it. Sometimes Maud thought that no one ever says anything casually. Behind the most random-seeming utterance there is always precise intent.

"I had a wife."

"It didn't work out?"

"If it had worked out I wouldn't be here."

She didn't know him well enough to interpret his tone. She wasn't sure if he was kidding around or being hostile.

"Why didn't it work out?"

"Things don't always work out in life."

"I know that. But what I meant was, why didn't this particular relationship work out?"

He didn't say anything, just took a sip of his water.

"Is it a horrible secret?" she said.

"It's not a secret," he said. "But it
is
horrible."

She suddenly felt that she'd walked too far into something that she shouldn't have walked into at all.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I shouldn't have been so flippant."

"That's all right."

He still hadn't told her what had happened, and now she was afraid to ask. Had his wife died?

With the unhappy phone message her mother had left her that afternoon—loneliness encoded within a cookie recipe—and now with this hint of tragedy in Samir's life, she felt surrounded by people who needed to be taken care of. She made a mental note to arrange a lunch date with her father. The great thing about her father was that he never
needed you
. That was the deal she had with her father: he won't take care of you, but you don't have to take care of him.

She was thinking that it was a good idea to stay away from people whose wounds are very apparent. Some people carry disaster around with them, and, if you have any instinct for self-preservation, when you come upon such people, you run.

By the time the check arrived, she had made up her mind. She was attracted to him, but she wasn't going to see him again. There was too much in the way. The problem of Arab and Jew; his guardedness; his height; the hint of tragedy in his past—there wasn't just one reason. Her conclusion that it would be better not to see him anymore was "overdetermined," as the insane French philosopher Louis Althusser used to say.

Having decided, she felt freer. He had been praised so highly by Celia and George that even before their first date she had started to feel as if they were engaged.

I don't have to marry this guy. I don't have to marry anyone. I can sit in my apartment reading for the rest of my life.

He paid the bill, and they decided to take a walk on the Promenade, which was two blocks away. It was a cold night, and the wind from the East River was swirling around them in great mad gusts. Manhattan looked glorious in the glinting mist.

As they walked, she felt glad that she didn't have to be self-conscious about her height anymore. She didn't need to stoop, because she didn't need to worry about his feelings.

"I always used to scrunch myself up when I was little," she said. "I was unhappy about how fast I was growing, so I tried to make myself short. I was like a little hunchback."

She didn't even know why she'd said this. It seemed sort of passive-aggressive, maybe. At any rate, it wasn't nice.

"Why were you unhappy about being tall?" he said. "Tall is powerful. Isn't it?"

He thought she had a strong name; he thought tall was powerful. She wondered if she should reconsider her decision about him. It might be nice to be with a guy who saw her as strong.

Maud had faith in the power of her mind—she loved to think and she had confidence in her thinking—but she didn't have much faith in anything else about herself. She certainly didn't think of herself as strong.

"Maybe that's why I was unhappy about being tall. Because people think tall is powerful. Maybe I thought that if I was smaller, people would want to take care of me."

To her own ears, this sounded like psychobabble, but it was true. Sometimes she felt like a wallflower, a little bookworm, trapped in the body of Xena the Warrior Princess.

"I should probably get home," she said. "I should do some work on my dissertation."

In other words, she thought, I've given up trying to chase you.

"Well, it was nice to see you," she said. "I'm glad we could get together. Arab and Jew. A testament to the fact that people can rise above their ancient prejudices."

She was talking just for the sake of talking, because nothing she said mattered, because she was never going to see him again. She felt more comfortable with him, now that they'd gotten a divorce.

"The swarthy Arab and the brainy Jew," he said.

"Brainy but resourceful. Don't forget, we defeated you in battle. Many times."

She leaned against the fence that bordered the Promenade and smiled at him. This might be the last time she'd ever see him. He was a good-looking little man.

He stepped toward her quickly and for one mad moment she thought he was moving with violent intent, angry that she'd bragged about the history of Arab military ineptness. He put his hands on her shoulders and his mouth on hers. The night was cold and the wind from the river was ripping at them and they were wearing thick fat jackets and her nose was numb and he tasted surprisingly delicious.

His hands were burrowing under the many layers of her winter wear. Cold fingers. They were still kissing.

This was the last thing she would have expected.

This is interesting, she thought.

Adam hurried away from his breakfast with Eleanor with the . feeling that he had narrowly escaped with his life. Eleanor could do that to you. With her unspeakably, almost ludicrously mournful eyes, the eyes of a cow who has been wronged, and with her aura of bravely suffering victimhood, and her talent for long silences, she could suffocate you under the weight of her moral superiority. When you left her, you felt as if you were breathing a freer air.

The thing about Eleanor was that although it was
she
who'd asked
him
to move out, after he did move out she found herself stripped of her identity, and after a brief panicky search for a new identity, she'd found one in being a victim. A brave and plucky victim.
That monstrous husband of hers mistreated her for years and then traded her in for an underage sexpot, but somehow she's found the strength to endure
—this, he thought, was what she wanted the world to say. She wanted the world to regard her with awe because she had remained unbroken—she wanted to transcend her victimhood just that far, but no further. Because if she transcended it further, she risked letting the world forget that she was a victim in the first place. And that would be unacceptable. The world must understand at every moment that she had been wronged, and who had wronged her.

He wasn't meeting Thea until lunchtime, so he went to the gym and spent half an hour in the weight room and half an hour on the treadmill. He felt perfect. His doctor couldn't believe how quickly his broken ankle had healed.

At sixty-three, Adam was in better shape than ever. He could bench-press two hundred pounds and he could run for ten miles. He derived no pleasure from exercising, yet he exercised faithfully, putting himself through his paces with a grim relish.

He flirted with a young woman on the treadmill next to him, and after she left he examined himself in the wall of mirrors and tried to remember how long it had been since he'd been attracted to Eleanor. More than a decade. When he married her, she was a beautiful young woman; now she was covered with rust.

He felt sorry for her, but, with a spirit of indifference that was partly innate in him and partly a quality he cultivated, he was able to derive some amusement from the thought of how things had turned out for the two of them. He was about to head downtown for an afternoon rendezvous with a regal mistress in the full bloom of her youth, while Eleanor, if she should ever decide that she wanted to find someone new to share her nights, would be signing up for golden-years mixers sponsored by the AARP.

An hour later he was at the Algonquin. He was supposed to meet a young academic who'd been writing him literary fan mail, and the young man had suggested they have lunch there. Thea had invited herself along, chiefly because of the location. The Algonquin seemed glamorous to her, because it was a literary landmark, the place where Dorothy Parker and her circle used to convene.

There was nothing glamorous about the place for Adam. The Algonquin wits had never been as witty as they were supposed to have been—for the most part they were mediocrities with good press agents. And in any case, they'd all been dead for decades, and their slightly fraudulent luster had vanished with them. Now the Algonquin was just a run-down hotel with a rundown restaurant in the lobby.

Adam didn't find Thea's naivete surprising. She was still in her twenties, and she was new to New York. A former high school beauty queen—she'd gone to college on a scholarship she'd earned by winning the tide of Miss Junior Wyoming—she had come to the city only a year ago, eager to make a mark. Precisely what kind of mark she wished to make was unclear, but she was intent on making one.

Thea may have been unsound in her literary judgments, but she had other virtues. Fie checked his coat and glanced into the dining room, and he knew where she was sitting even before he saw her. He didn't know how he knew it, but he always did. He didn't even question it anymore.

She was at a table in the corner with one of her vodka gimlets in front of her. Whenever he had his first sight of her, he had a moment of sheer disbelief that he could be with someone so beautiful.

"Hello, Weller," she said. "You're late."

She liked to call him by his last name because she thought it made her sound cynical and worldly, like Lauren Bacall in
To Have and Have Not
. Thea liked to imagine that in another life she could have been a film-noir heroine.

"Are you feeling all right?" she said as he sat down. "You look a little out of breath."

This too was vintage Thea. She liked to put you on the defensive. She liked to start things off with a jab.

"It's your beauty that's rendered me breathless, my dear."

"You're talking like a book again."

He asked her how her day had been so far, and she told him a story about her job. She was working as an assistant producer for Charlie Rose, with whom she had a love-hate relationship. It was a long story about the incompetence of a booking agent. Adam didn't listen closely to the details; he just let the names swim past him—Tim Robbins, Susan Sarandon, Paul Wolfowitz, Paul Berman—while he took pleasure in looking at her face. He couldn't say he was in love with her, but he hadn't enjoyed a woman's company so much since the early days with Ellie.

He had left Eleanor because of the explosive combination of Thea and Viagra. He'd been having affairs for years, but of steadily declining intensity, and he'd reached a point at which he could almost imagine giving them up. But then the lordly blue pill had entered his life and rendered him magnificent again. Women he had begun to consider out of his league—he could still get them, but he couldn't do much with them once he had them—once again seemed fitting objects of pursuit.