Breakable You (32 page)

Maud was decomposing into a thousand worries. It was almost as if she were indulging her worries, nurturing them.

David was sleeping. Tiny fingers, tiny lips. Yet like any infant he exuded an enormous indefinable force.

"This little guy needs you," Eleanor said. "He needs you to be strong."

"I know that," Maud said.

"And even if he
didn't
need you to be strong—you
are
strong. You're stronger than this, Maud. It feels like you're giving in to something. You don't have to."

Maud turned her head away. "I don't know if I can do this. I just don't know if I can do this." Her voice was clogged.

The sound of your daughter trying to speak through tears. Your daughter telling you she's going under. Eleanor had had more than twenty years' experience of helping people in trouble, and somehow it had all disappeared. What was the right thing to say? She had no idea. It was as if the experience of helping people had been stored in a discrete section of her mind, and that section had been removed.

"You can
fight
this," Eleanor said. "You have an amazing
mind
, Maud. You can
think
your way through this."

She had no idea whether this was the right thing to say. Maybe she should have told Maud to
stop
thinking so much.

But Eleanor had always loved her daughter's mind, always loved her willingness to use it. Maud's mind was a great shining thing. Eleanor closed her eyes and imagined it as a shield, a fallen shield, and she hoped that her daughter would have the strength to pick it up off the ground.

"Every night I think I'm going to do better the next day," Maud said. "But then there
is
no next day. He wakes me up about every ten minutes, and when morning comes around I feel more burned out than ever." She closed her eyes. "Sometimes I think it might be a good idea for me to spend a week in Holliswood."

Holliswood was the psychiatric facility where Maud had spent two weeks during her second breakdown, just after she graduated from college.

"Do you think you can get anything there that you couldn't get from a week in a hotel?" Eleanor said.

The American Psychological Association would probably frown upon the suggestion that a psychiatric hospital would be less helpful than a Holiday Inn. But she didn't want to see Maud go in again.

"I thought they had a good team there," Maud said.

"You could stay with me again," Eleanor said. "You could stay as long as you like."

Maud didn't answer.

Adam was watching television when the doorbell rang. He . looked through the spyhole and was surprised to find that Eleanor was in the hall.

He opened the door and let her in.

"I never thought I'd see you here," he said.

"I never wanted to be here. But these are extraordinary circumstances."

"Sit down. Can I get you a drink?"

"No thanks."

"I hope you won't mind if I fix one for myself."

He busied himself at the liquor cabinet, wondering what this was all about. He was expecting Thea within an hour, and he wanted Eleanor to be gone by the time she arrived.

"How can I help you?" he said.

"How can you help
me
?"

Her jaw dropped open.

Her jaw dropped open
: this was a phrase he would never have allowed himself to use in his fiction. It's the kind of description that lazy writers use, along with "He turned pale with anger" or "She was breathless with excitement." But in fact Eleanor's jaw did drop open. Letting her jaw drop was something she did habitually, when she was outraged by something—for example, when she was stunned by some incredibly thoughtless remark that someone, usually Adam, had made.

How glad he was that he was no longer involved with her, that he no longer lived in the eternal tropics of her suffocating virtue.

"Yes," he said. "How can I help you?"

"I didn't come here because I want you to help me. I came here because I want you to help your daughter."

She was thrusting her chin at him in a childish show of defiance. But he couldn't understand what she was being defiant about. She acted as if she expected that he'd refuse to help.

"Of course," he said. "What can I do for her?"

He wanted to sound obliging but already he was feeling the chafe of constraint. He hated it when he was expected to do things. He didn't mind being charitable, but he hated to be
expected
to be.

"You can call her every day and remind her she isn't alone. You can remind her that you love her. You can offer to help her out financially."

There it is, he thought. The rest of it is bullshit.

"How much does she need?"

"I don't
know
how much she needs.
She
doesn't know how much she needs. But she's in trouble. She doesn't make a lot of money and she's going to have to be paying for clothing and diapers and wipes and doctors' visits and help around the house. She can't do this alone, Adam. She needs you to be there for her. She needs both of us."

Eleanor was in her glory. The tendons of her neck were protruding as she made her appeal. Her earnestness, her self-righteousness, made her radiantly, triumphantly ugly.

He felt a headache coming on. He imagined grabbing her by the elbows, pulling her off the couch, and giving her the bum's rush out the door. It had been so blissful, during the past two years, to be free of her. Free of her demands. Free of her
needs
. Free of the self-righteousness of her needs.

Thea was different. Thea didn't have needs—not in this wussy way. Thea was one of the few women he knew who was contemptuous of feminism, yet Thea was the most feminist woman of them all. Because she didn't
need you
.

He was not going to be dragged back into that now. He was not going to be dragged back into the world of women's needs.

"I won't be sitting around her apartment holding her hand," he said. "Let me know what she needs, and I'll try to accommodate her. But I'm not going to be changing diapers and reading
Pat the Bunny
, Ellie. It's just not going
to
happen."

Again the look of indignation, righteous disbelief, disbelief that she could be dealing with such a monster.

"Get over yourself, Ellie. It's the same arrangement that's always suited you in the past. You can take care of the heavy emotional lifting, and I'll do what I can to foot the bills."

Eleanor stood up. Thank God, he thought.

She picked up her purse and clutched it in both hands. She looked like a nun. If she hadn't been born Jewish, he thought, she would have ended up a nun.

"I hope you're better than you're pretending to be, Adam. I hope you're capable of being more than this. There are times in life when we either become better than we've ever been before, or worse than we've ever been before. When there's no third way."

Be all that you can be
, he thought. The slogan of the U.S. Army. Ellie was trying to recruit him into the army of the virtuous.

"I love Maud as much as you do," he said. "And I intend to keep helping her. But she has her own life and she's going to have to meet her own challenges. And I'm not going to give you the authority to judge whether I'm succeeding or failing as a human being. So I strongly suggest that in the future you dispense with the lectures. I'm not interested in hearing about where I stand on your moral scorecard."

She was already in the hall, and she was giving him one of her silent looks of wounded comprehension—you had wounded her, but she was going to find a way to forgive you, and in forgiving you she was going to prove once again that she was superior to you. He had the feeling that she would have liked to have stood there giving him this look for ten or fifteen minutes, but he closed the door.

Thea was wearing a long black leather coat. Normally Adam helped women off with their coats, but now he stood in his foyer and watched.

With Thea, even taking off her coat was a performance. It wasn't quite like stripping, but it was exciting in its own way.

"Look what I have."

Her bag was at her feet; she reached down into it and removed a book. Rather, something that was not yet a book: a copy of the bound galleys of his novel.

Months before a book arrives in bookstores, its publisher produces a limited amount of early copies, which are called bound galleys. These go off in all directions: to writers who might supply blurbs for the back cover; to book-review editors; to the buyers at bookstores who decide what new books to order and how many; to overseas publishers and movie agents; to Oprah's people; to Oprah's people's people; and to who knows who else.

"Scribner sent five copies to Charlie, so I snagged one for myself."

"Five copies?" he said.

"I've seen these things all over town. It's a status symbol. The new Weller. 'Have you read the new Weller yet?'"

Thea was not generous with compliments or nattering reports, so this meant a lot.

He already knew that his publisher was pushing the book hard. People he ran into were congratulating him as if he'd won the Pulitzer Prize. And the book wasn't even out yet.

All this felt new to Adam. He'd never gotten the royal treatment before. There had been strong "prepublication vibes" around
Daybreak
, twenty-five years ago, but it was hard to compare the two experiences. The publishing business was much more modest then. It had not yet begun to wish it was the movie business. The clothes were slicker now, the restaurants glitzier. So when a book became a "publishing event,"
it felt
much bigger now, it was an event on a grander scale—even though it was over more quickly, since there was a new publishing event every week, a new novel that was being universally hailed as "astonishing."

Adam had no nostalgia for the old days, when the publishing industry had been populated by pompous old codgers with comb-overs and bowties. The new style, more brazen, was more amusing.

He knew that this book was going to succeed. He had such a calm and confident clarity about this that it made him feel like a mystic.

The fate of most books depends on circumstance—on whether they happen to get reviewed sympathetically in
The New York, Times
or on whether the author knows someone who can get him onto
Imus in the Morning
. But some books are bulletproof: no bad review or publishing-industry mishap can stop them from their appointment with success. He had felt that way about
Daybreak
, and that was the only one of his previous books he'd felt that way about. It was the book in which he'd worked most effectively within his own limitations, the book in which he'd turned his limitations most successfully into virtues. In that book his temperamental lack of charity had been perfectly suited to his subject and his theme. His habitual coldness was exactly what that book had needed. Writing it, he had been like a surgeon, of whom we don't require empathy but only the knowledge of how to cut.

This new book was something else. It was a departure. It was just as intelligent as any of his other books, but it was warmer; it was more humane.

It was not, of course, his. But after working through it patiently, testing every scene and every sentence, delicately restitching almost every phrase, he
felt
as though it were his. The question of its authorship rarely came into his mind anymore.

"So what happens to the other four copies?" he said. "Do any of them get to Charlie? Does Charlie read?"

"Charlie reads vociferously. I mean voraciously. And he reads whatever his brilliant young producer tells him to read. He'll be taking
So Late So Early
to the Hamptons this weekend."

Somehow the thought didn't fit: the book's cast of striving, idealistic young Jews, yearning for the true and the beautiful, traveling out to the Hamptons in Charlie's Jag.

"That's one copy. Another goes to Krissa, and another goes to Steve." Two other people who worked for the show. "And for the last copy, I decided, since you're probably too proud, to send it to Mister Unexpectedly Connected."

"That would be?"

"Jeffrey Lipkin, of course. The man who keeps the medals."

"Lipkin?"

"The one and only."

"Christ."

"Don't look so rattled, Weller. This will be your greatest triumph. When that little vegan was saying you were played out, you were working on the best book you've ever written. He'll kick himself, because if he had given you the Gellman prize already, people would be calling him a genius in the art of prize-giving. Little nerd though he is, he's more plugged in than anyone else I know."

This was complicated.

Adam had known that Jeffrey would read the thing eventually, of course. But he'd put the thought out of his mind.

Jeffrey, who had studied Izzy's work with an obsessiveness that Izzy himself would have found frightening, was probably the only person on earth who might be able to expose this book.

Sometimes you can feel like a cartoon character: you've run off the cliff without knowing it, and now you realize you're running in midair. And then you fall. Adam's faith that this book would be his crowning achievement had been based on a colossal act of forgetting. He'd managed to forget that Jeffrey Lipkin would inevitably read the thing and expose him for the fraud he was.

He cycled quickly through the possibilities: would it be better if it happened now, before the book was published, or six months from now?

It would kill his career either way, but it would probably be worse if it happened after the book was out. The scandal would be bigger.

So Thea had done him a favor after all.

Adam had been born with an uncommon resilience. Within a few minutes he was purely curious, pondering with something like enjoyment the question of whether Jeffrey would see the book for what it was. Enjoying the risk. If he could slip past Jeffrey undetected, he was free.

Maud had resumed her tradition of weekly dinners with Ralph. Early one Friday evening, carrying David in a fancy new sling her mother had bought her, she took the crosstown bus at Eighty-sixth Street and got off at Park Avenue.