Breakable You (31 page)

Although Maud didn't feel very unstoppable at the moment, she was glad to think her friends thought she had the chance to become so. As the conversation went on, though, she found that the belief in personal unstoppableness was the coin of the realm for those who had been through the Forum. I'm unstoppable, you're unstoppable: that seemed to sum it up for them.

Celia and George seemed completely, cutely, cuddlingly in love. She had grown chubbier and he had grown thinner, which suited them both. Celia was a cupcake now, and George was a candle. They held hands as they ate—she was a lefty and he was a righty, so they could pull this off—and they kept verbally adoring each other and giving each other succulent kisses.

It was hard to believe that these were her friends, hard to believe that these were the people who had introduced her to Samir. They didn't mention him once. She had known them to be considerate people, and she was sure that their silence had something to do with their newfound philosophy. Perhaps the Forum held that
it
was bad to dwell.

They ordered salads and appetizers and steaks and a bottle of wine; Maud, budget-conscious, had a salad and a glass of club soda. When the check came, George suggested that they keep things simple by splitting it three ways.

She got home and put David in his crib. The change in her friends had left her shaken. They were the only people in her life who had known Samir. It's not that she had wanted to talk about him, but she'd thought that she would feel closer to him after she spent some time in their presence. Instead she felt further away.

It was worse than that. By behaving so inanely, they were cheapening him. She was afraid that if she continued to see them, Samir would come to seem a trivial person, a lightweight.

She knew, of course, that that wouldn't happen. Nothing could make him seem trivial. But the evening had made him seem further away.

David was fussing. She picked him up and walked around the room and he quieted down.

She kept remembering the florid things she used to whisper to Samir in bed. You're my animal. I claim you. You're my mate.

Florid, silly, but also true. He
was
her animal; she
had
claimed him; he
was
her mate.

She remembered how powerful she used to feel when she was with him, how powerful he made her feel. In bed with him, especially, she used to feel like a commanding presence. She no longer felt that way. She had claimed him, but then death had claimed him, and the claim of death had been stronger than her own. Death had shown her how weak she was.

The next day she got together with her father. She wanted to see him for the most rational of reasons: in a month or so she would be broke, and she was hoping he could help her out. She didn't like the idea of asking him for money, but this was a special circumstance.

She also wanted to see him for irrational reasons. In some deep-rooted part of her mind he was still Daddy, imbued with all the magic and authority we confer on our fathers, and without really admitting it to herself she was holding on to the hope that if he saw her, saw how badly she was struggling, he would find some way to make everything work out.

She was meeting him at his apartment, which made her nervous. She didn't want to run into his girlfriend. She hoped they weren't actually living together, but she wasn't sure.

She waited with David at a bus stop on Broadway. When the bus came, the doors opened and the driver pushed a button to make it kneel, and it lowered itself slowly, like a noble elephant, and, wearing David in his carrier and a diaper bag over her shoulder, she climbed on.

Her father's building was intimidating. The lobby itself, an assemblage of inanimate objects, somehow seemed hipper than you could ever be. The doorman was a young man with a gleaming shaved head and a fierce goatee. He seemed like someone who could procure anything—a combination of athlete, actor, gigolo, medicine-runner, and pimp. He sat behind an elevated desk and you had to crane your neck to talk to him.

Her father met her at his door, kissed her on the cheek, and moved the collar of David's sweater so he could see him.

"How's the little fullback?" he said.

Her father was all dressed up, in a tie and jacket. Obviously he had plans. He wouldn't have dressed like this for her.

She hadn't given any thought beforehand to the way he'd be dressed, but she was disappointed to see him like this. When he was dressed casually, padding around his apartment in slippers, she occasionally got glimpses of the man he used to be, or, at any rate, of the man she used to think he was.

"How's he doing?" Adam said. "Healthy, I take it?"

"He's perfect," Maud said.

"You must be living an impossible life these days," he said, with his rich and sympathetic voice. "Are you still teaching your classes?"

"I took a leave."

"That's great that they let you do that," he said. "You were wise to enter the academic life. One of my old teachers, Daniel Bell, once said that there were three reasons why he had chosen the academic life."

June, July, and August, she thought. He had said this many times before.

"June, July, and August," he said.

He had photographs on his mantel—of her, of Josh with his family, of Carl with his. There weren't any photographs of her mother. In the center, in the place of honor, there was a photograph of Thea, a studio portrait in which she looked simultaneously glamorous and goofy. Maud had met Thea only once, by accident, in front of the foreign-cheese display at Fairway.

She had not been impressed. There was something ill fitting about Thea, Maud thought, that she couldn't really get rid of—she could show all the cleavage she had, and all the leg, and through this could distract people for a long while, but inevitably there came a time when you would look at her face, and there you would see an ineradicable trace of mere doofiness.

Maybe, she thought, my father hasn't gotten around to looking at her face yet.

"I've taken the liberty of ordering some lunch," Adam said. His dining room table was already set; in the middle were takeout cartons from a Chinese restaurant.

Maud arranged some pillows on an easy chair and made a nest to hold David while she ate.

"Mu shu vegetables?" Adam said. "Behold the master." He spread a line of vegetables and sauce onto a thin pancake and folded it up evenly and expertly. "I learned how to do this in the sixties," he said. "So my experiments weren't entirely wasted."

"Ah," she said. "Your experiments."

"Yes. I spent the sixties conducting experiments on the effects of long-term marijuana use on the youthful brain."

Her fortune cookie told her that he who hurries cannot walk with dignity; his told him that the wise man sayeth little.

"When did fortune cookies stop telling your fortune?" he said. "Someone should write an essay on the decline of the fortune cookie."

He made two cups of tea and brought them to the table.

"The two of you seem great," he said.

"It's actually been pretty hard, Dad," Maud said. She got up to pour herself some water. She didn't bother telling her father that she wasn't having caffeine while she was nursing.

"I'm sorry to hear that. Of course having a child has to be hard. And bringing a child up by yourself has to be… very hard."

"I know. It is."

"I'm sure your mother has been a great help."

"She has been," Maud said.

"Well, that's good. No matter how hard it's been, it sounds as if you've been doing beautifully."

What was stopping her from saying,
I feel like I'm falling apart, Dad. I feel like I'm falling apart again
? She didn't know, but she couldn't say it.

Now was the time to ask him for help. But it was so hard to ask him for anything. He had always bestowed his gifts at random. You never felt you had the right to request anything; rather, if he felt like giving you something, he gave it to you. To actually ask him for something would be to cross some uncrossable line.

After they had cleared away the dishes, Adam announced that he had to go. He was taking a cab and he offered to give Maud a ride home.

When they stopped for a light on Broadway and Sixtieth, a man walked up to the car and started mopping the windshield with a dirty rag.

"The squeegee men are back," Adam said. "Christ. I miss Giuliani."

"Why?"

"He was good for the city. The squeegee men are back, the graffiti is back on the subway. For one brief shining moment, it felt as if the grown-ups were in charge."

There were only a few minutes left in which to ask a favor of him.

She didn't know if he had the slightest sense of what she was going through. Though he'd had three of them, she wasn't sure he knew how much work it was to take care of a child. When she was little, her father was represented to her mainly by the closed doors of his study. Sliding doors that fit together nicely.

They were three blocks away from her apartment. Adam looked down at David and nodded approvingly.

"He's such a beautiful child," he said. "You're very fortunate."

"It's not easy."

"You make it seem easy. That's a gift. In the great game of motherhood, you're Joe DiMaggio. You're a class act."

"I don't know," she said. "It doesn't feel that way."

"I know that parenting has its burdens," he said, "but everything's relative. I think it's a lot more pleasant than publishing a novel, actually. People say that publishing a novel is just like having a baby. But that would only be true if, when you had a new baby, strangers came up to you on the street and said, 'What an ugly baby! Why'd you even bother having that baby! It's not as good as your other babies!' If that were the case, giving birth to a baby would be comparable to giving birth to a book."

He seemed pleased with this formulation. He was doing this purse-lipped thing he did when he'd uttered a phrase he'd liked, but modestly wanted to conceal the pleasure he took in his own wit, but wanted you to see that he was modestly concealing it.

"Dad?" she said, with one hand on the doorknob.

He leaned over and kissed her on the forehead.

"Stay safe, kitten," he said.

She cradled David's head carefully as she worked her way out the door, and waved at her father as the cab drove off.

"Have you eaten anything today?" Eleanor said.

"I don't know. I think I had some toast."

Eleanor was about to say, "You should eat," but then decided that it would be a good idea to go easy on the shoulds.

"Why don't I make you something?" she said.

She looked in Maud's refrigerator, but there was hardly anything there. Peanut butter, maple syrup, halvah.

Eleanor was growing more alarmed every day. She kept expecting Maud to snap out of this, and it kept not happening. Maud stayed in with David most of the day, watching TV.

Eleanor stopped herself from saying, "Your child needs light. He needs fresh air. You're starving him." Instead she said, "Why don't we all go for a walk?"

It was an unusually warm Saturday in November, and Broadway was crowded. Everyone looked free. There was no way that Eleanor could wish David out of the world—she was already fiercely attached to him—but for the thousandth time she thought it would have been better for Maud if she'd never gotten pregnant, if she'd never met Samir in the first place.

David was in his carrier, riding between Maud's breasts. The bumpiness of the ride must have disturbed him, and he spat up. Maud wiped the liquid off his face with a tissue. There was a garbage can on the corner but it was already overflowing. She put the tissue in her hip pocket.

"I've always loved New York," Maud said. "I've always thought I couldn't live anywhere else. But it's starting to disgust me."

It was hard for Eleanor to take her eyes off her grandson. The tininess of every part of him was astonishing. She could look at his eyes and feel astonished by how small they were, then look at his lips and feel astonished by how small they were, then look at his fingers…

"I can't even remember when you kids were this small," Eleanor said. "It seems to last so long when you're living it, but then it feels like a dream."

She was thankful to be out of Maud's apartment. It was crazy there, with unwashed dishes stacked high in the sink, newspapers strewn about, humid full-packed diapers piled in the bathroom's overflowing trash can.

But New York
can
seem hideous when you have an infant with you. Central Park was a dull brown, and there were signs taped to the trees, signs with skulls and crossbones, warning that the lawns had been treated with rat poison.

"Enjoy the park," Maud said. "Side effects include seizures and vomiting."

They sat on a bench. Maud discreetly draped a thin nursing blanket over David's carrier and unbuttoned her shirt.

"Let's try this again, big guy."

He fed a little and then spat the nipple out.

"Better than nothing," Maud said. "You're getting there."

They were sitting near a part of the park that Eleanor loved, a beautiful wooded enclave that encouraged aimless meandering.

"That's the Ramble," Eleanor said.

Maud looked vaguely at the trees.

"It doesn't look like I remember," she said.

Her eyes were welling up.

Eleanor had never spanked her children, but she thought that Maud might benefit from a good sharp slap right about now. To be thrown into despair by the sight of the Ramble! It was too much.

"Let me take this guy," Eleanor said. Maud took off her carrier, lifted David out, and handed him to Eleanor.

It felt good to bear the weight of this creature in her arms.

"You don't think his head is lopsided, do you?" Maud said.

"His head is perfect," Eleanor said.

"I know it's normal for their heads to be a little lopsided at first. But his head seems more lopsided than…"

"Than what?"

"I look at lopsided baby heads on the Internet sometimes."

"His head is fine," Eleanor said, but Maud continued to look fretful.