Breakable You (35 page)

He had no idea who Ralph was, but he didn't bother to ask.

"And then for the most part, they try to fill up your time with activities," she said. "They like to keep us occupied. Group therapy, rec therapy, art therapy. In art therapy you sit around drawing with crayons."

"Really?"

"No. Not really. Watercolors. It's almost as bad."

"I'm sure you've done some fine watercolors. If you give me one or two I'll hang them on my refrigerator."

"With little magnets? That will be nice. Just like you used to do when I was in kindergarten."

He was glad that he could joke with her, at least.

A woman entered the room. Probably in her mid-thirties, she was tall and slender, with dark brown hair and brown eyes. She was clearly a therapist or a visitor, not an inmate. She looked as if she'd just beaten a roomful of men at poker. She walked up to the silent, stunned woman, who gained a nicker of animation when she saw her guest.

Adam could tell a lot about her at a glance. She had been raised in a wealthy family: he could see it in her air of confidence, her ease. A wealthy family, but one of those old-style wealthy families that were dedicated to the idea of service. He could see this because although her blouse and skirt were obviously expensive and chosen with care, they were demure, drawing no attention to themselves, and because the only jewelry she wore were pearl earrings and a necklace with a single pearl.

He could hear her suggesting to the shell-shocked woman that they take a walk. The two of them left the room, and he was able to concentrate on his daughter again.

"Do they let you check your e-mail when you're here?" he said.

"You can't use the Internet at all. They used to have Internet access but apparently the men were always using it to visit porn sites."

"Not being able to check your e-mail doesn't seem like a bad thing," he said. He had about a hundred unanswered messages in his in-box.

"That's true. It's kind of a relief. But I'm in this online philosophy discussion group, and I'd give anything if they'd just let me get on the computer long enough to read the posts once a day. It's not just a bunch of graduate students talking out of their hats. Last month they had an online debate between Richard Wolin and Richard Rorty. But they won't let me do it. You can sit here watching
Fear Factor
until you feel sick, but Internet access is strictly forbidden."

"Can't someone just print out the discussions and bring them to you?"

"Mom's the only person I'd feel comfortable asking, and… you know Mom and computers. A couple of weeks ago she said she thought she needed to get her computer repaired, and I took a look at it, and the only thing wrong with it was that the mouse wasn't plugged in."

Adam had been using a computer for more than twenty years. He'd been using one when most of the writers he knew, wedded to their Selectrics or their Parker pens, were piously swearing that they would never go near one, since it might wreck the delicate cadences of their art. He was about to tell her that he could print the discussions and bring them to her every day. This was his first visit in the five days she'd been here, but that didn't mean he couldn't change his pattern. She was his daughter.

He stopped himself from telling her, though. There was no point in making promises. She probably wouldn't have believed him if he had. You are what you do. He could come back tomorrow with a care package—the computer printout and some actual food. She'd be stunned.

He asked her how to find the Web site. "If I get a chance, maybe I'll print something out and send it to you." He wanted to sound casual.

He kissed her good-bye and went out into the welcoming day.

If he had visited her the day before, he would have considered his obligations fulfilled. But now he could see that his obligations went deeper. He was going to come back the next day.

He was going to come back every day until Maud felt strong enough to leave.

Adam had long ago grown sick of the conventions of fiction, whereby a narrative gains a sense of completion when the characters "change" or "grow." He had long ago decided that this convention was a comforting lie. People hardly ever actually change or grow once they're past the age of twenty or twenty-five.

But now he saw the matter in a different light. Maybe a man
can
change. It helps when you've been injured, when you've been dislodged from the complacent routines of your life. Sometimes it takes an injury to make you see what you share with others.

Maud didn't know if this was the end or not.

It was nighttime, and she was lying in her bed in her room in Holliswood.

Traditionally, the third time is the last time. A drowning man comes up three times and then goes under.

Before she'd left her apartment, she'd put some things in a bag. Toiletries, clothing, and books. Tonight she was looking through one of the books she'd brought. The parables and aphorisms of Franz Kafka.

"One must not cheat anybody," she read. "Not even the world of its triumph."

She found this haunting, although she wasn't sure what he meant.

She'd also brought her diary, thinking that it might help her organize her thoughts, but although she wrote for twenty minutes at the end of every day, nothing she wrote came close to capturing what she was going through.

This didn't surprise her. She'd learned in the past that you can't describe the experience of misery—that she couldn't, at least. It was as if misery lived below the level of language. Years ago she'd read William Styron's book about depression and found that he couldn't really describe any of it either. He spoke of howling caverns and yawning depths, which she supposed was as close as you could get to describing it, but it wasn't really very close.

She didn't know what other people's depressions were like. Hers was like a blank white wall. It didn't reside in the moments when she wanted to kill her son, but in the moments when she didn't care whether he lived or died. Before her mother had arrived that day, she had spent the morning carrying David around the apartment, feeling like his prisoner, because he wouldn't let her put him down. Finally, because she needed to rest for a minute, she had put him in his crib, and as soon as she let go of him, he started to scream. He screamed, and kept screaming, and she sat down not far from him and watched him as he lay there, his screams interrupted only by gasps, as if he were drowning, and although she knew he'd quiet down if she went back over to him and picked him up, she couldn't imagine why she should want to do that. As she sat there listening to him, she was a thing without feeling. She was no longer someone who could imagine killing a child in anger; she was someone who could imagine allowing a child to die, simply because she didn't care to save him.

She was hoping that if she got a little time to rest here, she might return to a state of being she could recognize as her own.

In the taxi, on the way toward Patrick's hotel, Eleanor was thinking that life brings you everything at once. You can be in misery because of the misery of your daughter at the same time as you're exhilarated by a new romance, a romance that feels like the first act of a new life.

Her friend Vivian was taking care of David for the night. Her thoroughly unmaternal but good-hearted friend Vivian. She had been holding David when Eleanor left, and she'd looked as if she were holding a skunk. Eleanor had had to reassure her that as long as she didn't drop him, she could consider the night a success.

When Patrick opened the door of his hotel room, they didn't kiss. It was almost as if they were afraid to. Nothing stood between them anymore, and this made them shy.

His room was on the fifteenth floor. The wall that faced east was one huge window. The East River was shimmering; the cluster of illuminated bridges to the south looked like creatures of a great and ancient dignity; and Brooklyn looked almost glamorous in the dark.

"This city of yours…" Patrick said.

The hotel room was clean and large. It had a minibar, an entertainment console, a TV with a VCR, a couch, a dinner table, and a desk, upon which sat a card trumpeting the wonders of the high-speed Internet connection available in every room. As she took it all in, she noted, with a gloomy self-awareness, that it was important to her that the room was nice—in other words, that it was expensive. Without really thinking about it, she had been afraid that the hotel room would testify to the cranky frugality of a lifelong radical, a man who distrusted wealth and all its trappings.

It had always been easy for her to imagine herself untainted by any interest in material comforts, untouched by the sordid world of getting and spending, but only because life with Adam had surrounded her with luxuries.

Patrick was talking about his older daughter and the outcome of his peacekeeping mission.

She'd had a weird taste in her mouth all day. Before she left home she'd brushed her teeth three or four times, scraping the back of her tongue until she gagged, but the taste hadn't gone away. She hoped she wouldn't taste weird to him, if he kissed her.

She had once read that you can tell what your breath smells like by licking your skin, waiting ten or fifteen seconds, and smelling it. Sitting in the back of the cab on the way over here, as the driver, wearing a headset, chatted in excited Hindi to a friend, she had licked her forearm, smelled it, and hadn't been able to tell. It smelled pleasant, but she didn't know if she could believe that that was really what her breath smelled like, and even if she could, she didn't know if it would seem equally pleasant to Patrick. When she was little, one of her friends had pronounced that people secretly love the smell of their own farts.

Patrick poured a sherry for her and a scotch-and-water for himself. They sat on the couch side by side.

He was through with his story about his daughter. She hadn't heard a word of it. Will this be on the test? she thought.

"Here we are," he said.

What happens now? she thought. They were free. There was nothing holding them back.

But nothing holding them back from
what?
If they were young they would have hurled themselves at each other now. But she was sixty and he was sixty-two. It wasn't as if the erotic impulse had vanished, but it had changed. It was subtler now.

This was how it was for her, at least. She had no idea how it was for him. All she knew was that at this moment, she didn't feel a hint of a glimmer of sexual desire.

He put down his drink and brushed a strand of hair away from her face.

She took his hand in both of hers, examined it, kissed it.

"You're more beautiful than ever," he said.

Of course she knew this wasn't true, and of course he didn't believe it himself, unless he was suffering from an as-yet-undiagnosed brain tumor. But he looked at her as if he meant it.

"It's a serious thing we're doing," he said, "but I'm glad that we're doing it."

She hoped he wasn't going to kiss her. She wasn't comfortable yet.

He leaned toward her and kissed her. As he kissed her she was half in the room, experiencing it, and half remembering their first kiss, at the end of their first date, nearly forty years ago. It had been an unusual kiss. Light but long. An auspicious kiss, it had seemed at the time, a kiss that was opening the door to a lifetime, but it hadn't been. She'd left him within a year.

But maybe it had been. Here they were.

She was relieved to find that he didn't taste like anything in particular. He didn't have foul old-man breath. But she was still worried that she might have foul old-woman breath.

She wanted to tell him that she needed to stop, needed to pause for a little while at least. But she didn't trust herself. They'd been waiting for almost a year now, and maybe it was time to take the plunge.

They were necking on the couch, and in the pushing together of bodies she thought she could tell that he had an erection, and she wondered if it was purely him or if it had been aided by Viagra. Not that it mattered, except that it would be flattering if it was purely him.

This man wants me. As broken a creature as I am
. As a well-preserved sixty-two-year-old, he could have had his pick of all sorts of women ten or fifteen years younger. Merry widows and gay divorcees. And yet he wanted her. With her sheepishly fallen breasts and the twenty pounds that she'd put on for the part, she was somehow still desirable to him.

Can you take the whole of me
? A line from a half-remembered poem. He seemed to want the whole of her, and this was so different from what she had known for decades that she was amazed.

And what about her? Could
she
take the whole of
him
? She didn't know if she could promise it. She had too many burdens: her children and her grandchildren came before him, and that would never change.

Maud in the psychiatric hospital. Maud on the bench, crying at the sight of the Ramble. How strange. Poor David, who could never quite keep the nipple in his mouth. It was as if they were here too, sitting on the couch at Eleanor's side.

I don't have the strength for this.

Although they were still kissing, it had become obvious to her that she could not embark upon a love affair. She didn't have it in her. The struggles ahead of her were different struggles: trying to help Maud, trying to help Maud's child, trying to keep alive the creative spirit that she had only recently begun to rekindle.

Their lips were making juicy smacking sounds. It sounded unreal. It reminded her of the way it used to sound when at the age of nine she would engage in kissing sessions with her own arm, practicing for the day when she'd be called upon to kiss a boy.

Patrick pulled his head back and put his arms on her shoulders. "Hey," he said.

"Hey."

"What's going on?"

"I'm sorry, Patrick. I can't do this. I have so many things to worry about right now."

"This doesn't have to be one of them." He went to get a hard-backed chair, placed it near the couch, sat down, and took her hand. "This can be the thing that's worry-free."