Breakable You (34 page)

"I know."

It was raining outside so Eleanor couldn't make Maud go out for a walk.

David, in his crib, started to cry. Maud put him on his changing table, took his diaper off, and cleaned him. On the television, two of the cops from
Law <& Order
were talking to a female suspect.

Maud watched for a minute. "I think that's Julia Roberts," she said.

Maud turned back to David and, as Eleanor watched, she took a soiled diaper from a shelf next to the changing table and put it on him.

"Maud," Eleanor said.

"Yes?"

"What are you doing?"

"What do you mean?"

"You've just put a dirty diaper on your son."

"I did?"

Maud took the diaper off again and looked at it.

"How did I do that?"

She carried both diapers to the trash. Then she cleaned David again and put him in a fresh diaper. She picked him up and held him in one arm and unbuttoned her blouse.

"I don't think I can do this, Mom," she said.

Eleanor was watching David nurse. "You're doing fine. He knows how to find the nipple now."

"That's not what I mean," Maud said. "You wouldn't happen to know if Michael Bergman is still connected to Holliswood?"

Bergman was a therapist Maud had worked with for years. Holliswood was the place where she'd found him.

"I don't," Eleanor said. "I can find out."

"I think that would be good," Maud said. She ran her hand over David's soft, feathery hair. "But what am I going to do about the dumpling?"

"I can take care of him," Eleanor said. "I can take care of him until you feel better."

"How would I pay for it?"

"Your health insurance will probably pay most of it. Whatever's left over, I could take care of."

"How?"

"I have a secret fund. For a rainy day. And anyway, even if I couldn't, your father would help out."

"Who?" Maud said. At least Eleanor thought she said it. She said it so softly that Eleanor wasn't sure.

Eleanor was making daily visits. For a few days Maud seemed to be doing better. She seemed to be trying, at least. But one Thursday, Eleanor arrived early, with coffee for herself and herbal tea for Maud, and while she was still in the elevator, not yet at Maud's floor, she could hear David shrieking. As she walked down the hall toward Maud's door, the loudness of it seemed unbelievable.

She rang the doorbell, tried the door, and found it unlocked.

David was in his crib. He was lying on his back. He was still too young to turn, too young to lift his head. He was red-faced, pissed off, screaming.

Maud was sitting in a chair across the room. She was sitting erect and still, and Eleanor's first impression was that she didn't care that David was crying. But when Eleanor came closer, she understood that this wasn't true. Maud's face was changed. Something was gone.

David's wailing still filled the room, but for a moment Eleanor almost forgot about him. Her daughter was suffering, and that was all that mattered.

"I can't do this," Maud said.

Thea ordered a glass of champagne.

"The time has come, the walrus said."

She looked as if she was in particularly high spirits, and Adam was eager to hear what she had to say. She looked as if she was going to tell a story about some new triumph.

It was early on a Saturday afternoon. They had met for lunch. Later that night Adam was going to take her to a party at the home of a friend of his who worked at
Harper's
.

As by a gentle breeze, he was refreshed by the thought of how glad he was not to be living with Ellie. Ellie had never liked
Harper's
: she thought it specialized in snobbishness and snark. She had always tried to make him feel guilty about appearing in its pages.

"What are the many things we should talk about?" he said.

She looked down into her champagne and then abruptly looked up, smiling brightly, and said, "Here's the thing. I think we should stop seeing each other romantically."

Remain calm. It was essential to appear calm.

"Splendid," he said.

He was about to ask why, but he restrained himself.

He had been a writer and a reader all his life, but in moments of pressure he tended
to
draw on the movies for guidance. This moment was no exception. Humphrey Bogart wouldn't have asked why, and neither would Cary Grant. All the way across the spectrum of maleness, from the laconic tough guy to the urbane wit, the impressive response was not to ask.

And if he did ask, what kind of answer would he receive? Either she would tell him that there was another man, or she would tell him that there wasn't. In either case, the truth was that there
was
another man. Knowing Thea, he was sure of that. And knowing Thea, he was sure that she had traded up: she'd found someone who could be of more use to her than he could.

"That's all you have to say?" she said.

"What else
is
there to say?"

"I didn't think it would be this easy," she said. "Thank you for making it this easy."

"I've had a wonderful time with you, my dear. So I thank
you
. For everything. I always knew that this day had to come. I'm just glad that I could be of use to you for a while."

"You've been of
great
use to me," she said. She seemed moved, and he saw that she hadn't heard the irony in his remark. "You've brought me into the world."

He was trying to figure out who the new man was. It would have to be someone he'd heard of. Some young writer, someone who was all the rage? Someone she'd met on the set of
Charlie Rose
? Or maybe it was Charlie Rose himself?

He couldn't get over how stunning she looked. But she wasn't stunning for him anymore. Her high color, her vivid brightness, hadn't been a sign of how happy she was to see him. It was, perhaps, a sign of how tense she felt, how frightened she felt at the thought of breaking up with him. Or perhaps it was a sign of how exhilarated she felt at having a new man in her life.

Adam finished his drink. "Excuse me," he said, and slid out of the booth and went to the men's room.

He was glad to find that the restroom was empty. He ran the water in one
of
the sinks, caught some of it in his hands, and splashed his face.

When he had looked at himself in the mirror before leaving the apartment
to
join Thea, he had seen a vigorous sixty-four-year-old, a man who had grown steadily more attractive as he had aged. Now he saw a man who was many years past his prime.

He would have liked to sneak out of the restaurant and go home. Maybe he could. He could leave through the back entrance.

But that wasn't the way. He had
to face
her.

Continuing the meal as if she hadn't hurt him would be a small act of class. He wanted to perform this classy gesture, but he didn't want to do it all day. He had his
cell
phone in his jacket pocket. He had the number of Maud's clinic. The front desk of Bedlam.

It took a few minutes to reach her; someone had
to
find her; she had to come to the phone. She sounded happy to hear from him.

"I was wondering if you wanted a visitor. Would it be all right if I came over in a little while?"

She sounded genuinely excited. "That would be great, Dad. But they have this complicated visiting schedule. I'm not sure they'll let you in."

"I've never yet met an establishment that wouldn't let me in. I'll see you in about an hour."

When he returned to the table he sat down and said, "Did you see the new
New York Review of Books
? Your hero David Foster Wallace seems to have laid an egg."

"He's not my hero," Thea said quietly. Then, even more quietly: "You are."

He knew what she was feeling. She had come into the restaurant as if she were wearing a suit of armor, prepared to defend herself against his arguments, his bitterness, his insults. And now she was stunned and full of gratitude because he hadn't given her a hard time. While she had been preparing to fight herself free of him, she'd walled herself off so thoroughly from her affection for him, that now, when it turned out that she didn't have to fight him, all the affection for him that she did have—genuine affection—had been released. She was probably experiencing a moment of regret, wondering if she should stay with him after all.

"I hope we can still be friends," she said, which was unworthy of her.

It was tempting to hope that through repeated demonstrations of his inner strength, repeated demonstrations that he didn't need her, he would be able to win her back. But he knew that if he tried to play it that way, it would lead only to heartbreak. She had announced her intention to leave him, and whether she carried it out now or six months in the future, she would inevitably carry it out. There was no way around that one. She had hurt him, and he wasn't going to give her the opportunity to do it again.

"We'll see. But let's give it a little time, shall we?"

He signaled to the waiter and paid the bill. He stood up and she remained seated. She was wearing a skirt with a slit in it. He took a last glance at her long legs. "Good-bye, Gams," he said.

A nickname for a film-noir heroine. She smiled: a fond, misty, jazz-saxophone-in-the-distance kind of smile. "You know me so well. How am I ever going to find anybody who knows me so well?"

He put on his coat, clasped her hands, and let go. He didn't understand why he should be put in the position of comforting
her
.

They went out to the street together. He called her a cab, and, shutting the door, said, "You'll do fine."

Then he called a cab for himself and went out to Holliswood, to see his daughter.

The cab ride made him nauseous. He didn't have a great deal of sentiment about Thea herself, and yet her leaving him was a blow. He didn't know what his chances were of attracting anyone else like her: so young, so vibrant, so obviously in a hurry.

Just as Ellie had for years lent him an air of compassion that he did not in fact possess, Thea had lent him an air, not of youth-fulness, but of something like
currency
. She had made him appear to be someone who mattered to the young. She had made him seem to be a creature of the contemporary world, rather than a fossil from a bygone age when Jewish intellectuals walked the earth.

At Holliswood the receptionist, or guard, or whatever the young man was, told him that afternoon visiting hours were over and evening visiting hours would not begin until eight. Adam refrained from telling him what he was thinking: that he wasn't in the habit of allowing his desires to be overruled by people in rented uniforms. He politely asked to speak to a supervisor, politely told the supervisor a few lies—he said that he was flying out of the country later that night and this was his last chance to see his daughter until the next month—and was allowed into the unit.

He found Maud in the lounge area. The drab linoleum floors, the long tables with built-in benches: it was as if she'd been demoted to elementary school.

She was wearing her own clothes, which surprised him: without actually having thought about it, he had imagined that she would be wearing a hospital gown.

"Hello, my dad," she said. She gestured vaguely around the room. "An unhappy turn of events for the young philosopher."

"Nothing more than a rite of passage," he said. "You probably can't even
be
a philosopher if you haven't spent some time in a sanatorium. Nietzsche, Wittgenstein…"

"I know. I just was hoping that I'd served all my time already."

There were two other women in the room, watching a reality show in which people were eating live maggots. The television was mounted high on one of the walls, so that you had to hold your head back in an awkward position to see the screen.

Adam only glanced at the women, but he was disturbed by what he saw. Both of them were obviously
off
. One of them was marked by an air of dullness or vacancy or vagueness—you looked at her and you imagined a history of shock therapy, neurons fried to a crisp—and the other seemed to be afflicted by some other kind of faulty wiring: she was keeping up a running commentary on the program, in a shrill and spittle-flicking way.

He didn't want to believe that his daughter belonged here, in this community of the damaged and the dull. But it was hard to ignore the evidence that she did. She looked both frantic and lethargic, somehow. She kept touching her nose, and she was blinking in a weird rhythm, as if she couldn't speak freely here and was trying to signal to him in Morse code.

"How is it here?"

"It's not that bad. At least I don't have a roommate."

But maybe everyone belonged here, in the community of the damaged. If he had visited her yesterday it would have seemed like an alien land, but now he wasn't sure.

Yesterday he had felt like a distinguished writer and a sexually vital man. Now he felt nothing but old. No one had ever left him before. He had always been the leaver.

There were two books on the floor near Maud's chair. One of them was
A Short History of Ethics
, by Alasdair Mclntyre, and the other was
Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity
, by Richard Rorty.

"You're still reading philosophy."

"Of course I am."

A little gargoyle of a man entered the room pushing a food cart and distributed small cups of ice cream to everyone, with plastic spoons. "Chocolate for you, my man?" he said to Adam, with a wink. "Hope you like it, 'cause it's all we got left."

"The food here," Maud said. "It's unbelievable. It's like eating old boots."

He thought of asking her if visitors were permitted to bring food. He could bring her an assortment of things from Zabar's. He seemed to remember that she liked the tofu spread; he seemed to remember that Ellie always used to be sure to have some on hand when Maud came home on vacations from college.

"What do you do here all day?"

"Mom's been visiting every day, with David. And my friend Ralph's been coming by."