Breakable You (4 page)

He had never intended to leave Eleanor. After the first two or three flings, years ago, he'd been sure that Eleanor knew about them, had made her peace with them, was merely pretending not to see them. He had assumed that things would go on like this forever, but with Thea it all changed. Thea had asked for more and more of him, and he'd surprised himself by giving it. She didn't ask for money (she wasn't vulgar) and she didn't ask for love (she wasn't sentimental); what she asked for was recognition. His other mistresses—he was old-fashioned enough to use this word—had accompanied him when he traveled, but in public they'd maintained a discreet distance. Thea refused to be distanced. Adam knew many people who might be of use to her in her professional life, and she wanted to meet them all. He'd still somehow thought the affair could go unnoticed—unnoticed, or at least unmentioned, by Eleanor—but one night, sitting in the living room with Eleanor, he mentioned having attended some July Fourth event sponsored by
The New Yorker
, and Eleanor, who had been pecking at the remote control in search of
Judging Amy
, had instantly put it down and said, "You're seeing someone." He was so surprised—surprised that
she
was surprised—that he didn't have the presence of mind to deny it. And everything followed from that. If he had denied it, Eleanor would have chosen to believe him, and he would still be living with her on Riverside Drive. "I think you should leave," she had said, and, still in a daze because it was so hard to absorb the idea mat she hadn't known about all his previous affairs, he took a few things with him and left. At the time he wished he'd been cool-headed enough to deny everything—to tease her a little about mistrusting him—but now he was glad about the way things had played out.

Thea was still talking about Charlie Rose, but now she interrupted herself. "That must be your young admirer," she said.

A young man was approaching the table. Even from a distance he seemed awkward and uncertain. Adam rose and extended his hand.

"Mr. Weller," the young man said. "You don't know what an honor it is to meet you."

"It's overdue. We've been e-mailing for so long that I feel as if we've met already." Adam said this as he searched through his memory for the young man's name.

"You must be Jeffrey Lipkin," Thea said, rescuing him.

Adam had taken the man's measure before he'd even sat down. Jeffrey Lipkin was no different from the dozens of other supplicants Adam had met in the past few years. How familiar the type had become: all with the same tongue-tied eagerness, the same panicky need to please, the same vaguely homosexual hunger for a mentor.

Adam and Thea had already ordered. After a minute of introductory small talk, Jeffrey picked up a menu. "What's good here?" he said. "What's good here that doesn't have meat?"

"Vegetarian," Thea said darkly. "Oh dear."

"Why are people bothered by vegetarianism?" Jeffrey said. "Making fun of vegetarians is the only respectable prejudice left."

"It isn't a prejudice," Thea said. "There's something about vegetarians. Gandhi was the only vegetarian with balls."

One of the things Adam shared with Thea was the pleasure they took in attacking, and one of the things that amused him about her was her habit of attacking anyone anywhere, firing off shots in all directions. He never could have proceeded through the world that way, particularly not when he was young. But a beautiful young woman could get away with it. Could get away with practically anything.

Adam wasn't sure why this young man had wanted to meet him. They had been corresponding for a few weeks, but Jeffrey's purposes were still unclear. Jeffrey was an assistant professor at Rutgers, nervously compiling credentials for his bid for tenure. His area of specialization was Jewish American fiction, so his getting in touch with Adam was understandable, but after one e-mail expressing his admiration for Adam's novels and another asking some quietly show-offy questions, questions designed to demonstrate his intimate acquaintance with Adam's work, he had stayed in touch, and Adam hadn't quite figured out why. At first Adam had thought that Jeffrey wanted to write something about him, but Jeffrey hadn't said anything to that effect.

They talked aimlessly for a few minutes—New York intellectuals, New York restaurants, New York hotels.

"Are you working on a book?" Adam said. "If you're trying to get tenure you probably have to publish something, don't you?"

"I haven't actually started writing, but I am considering something." A small smile, an odd one: Jeffrey seemed to be reaching for modesty but he couldn't quite suppress a hint of a smirk. "Actually, that has something to do with why I looked you up in the first place. I was on leave last semester, and I spent a lot of time in the archives at Brandeis."

As soon as he said this, Adam's mood turned gray. He knew what was coming.

"You want to write a biography of Izzy Cantor," Adam said.

"How did you know?" Jeffrey said.

As if there could be any other fucking reason, Adam thought, for him to be nosing around the archives at Brandeis.

"Izzy Cantor?" Thea said. "Another of your desiccated friends from days gone by?"

Because Adam's mood had changed, he no longer found Thea's manner amusing. In fact, he wouldn't have minded crushing a grapefruit into her face. He should have saved Ellie's grapefruit and used it on Thea. And then Thea could have used it to attack someone else. The grapefruit could travel all over town.

"You don't know of him?" Jeffrey said, gaping, as if she'd said she'd never heard of Chaucer. He looked quickly at Adam, with an expression that seemed to say that it was hard for him to believe that Adam could be seeing a woman who had never heard of Izzy Cantor. Which irritated Adam all the more. You could say that one of the things that Adam looked for in a mistress was that she
hadn't
heard of Izzy.

Jeffrey addressed Thea. "Isidore Cantor was…" He turned toward Adam. "But I should let you talk."

"No, no," Adam said. "I'd like to hear what a bright young English professor has to say about the man."

"Isidore Cantor was a writer. Between 1965 and 1992 he wrote five of the strangest, most unclassifiable novels that American literature has ever produced. In an essay he wrote for
Esquire
in the eighties he said—I think I can get this right—that Adam Weller, my oldest friend, is my conscience, literary as well as political. If I didn't know him my fiction would be flabby and my opinions ill informed.' The section about the two of you growing up in the Bronx was one of the most moving things he ever wrote."

"It was a nice article," Adam said.

"How did you become friends? He was a lot older."

"Our mothers were best friends. We were in each other's apartments all the time. He was like an older brother. I worshipped him. He was the first person who ever mentioned Walt Whitman in my presence. Also the first person who ever mentioned Joe DiMaggio."

"And you remained close friends until the end of his life," Jeffrey said, half as a statement, half as a question.

"We did," Adam said quietly. "I was with him the night before he died."

"And, if you don't mind my saying so, the fact that someone like you hasn't heard of him"—Jeffrey turned to Thea as he said this—"is proof of why we need a biography. He was a major writer. Besides that, he led a fascinating life—"

"A writer who led a fascinating life?" Thea said. "Do tell."

Jeffrey had a frighteningly wide grin, as if he'd been wanting to talk about Izzy Cantor for many long years. "In the mid-fifties, after he got out of college, he spent a year in a Zen monastery in Japan, observing a year of silence."

"He never did explain to me why he felt the need to do that," Adam said. "He claimed he just didn't have anything to say."

"In 1960 he played a role in the early Civil Rights movement. He was involved in the lunch counter sit-ins in North Carolina."

"He got his nose broken down there," Adam said. "It improved his appearance."

"And it was only after that, after his return to New York, that he started to take writing seriously. And that was when he began to produce a series of novels that bear the same relationship to the work of his contemporaries that Nathanael West's work bore to the writing of people like Hemingway and Fitzgerald in the thirties. In other words, it was unclassifiable. It wasn't the realism of writers like Saul Bellow and Philip Roth—and Adam Weller." He turned toward Adam as he said this, and Adam was annoyed. He liked to be flattered, but the flattery had to be plausible. It was one of his chronic grievances that no critic had ever placed him on the level of Bellow and Roth. "And it wasn't the pop experimentalism of writers like Barthelme and Coover. It was something all its own. Which is one reason, I think, that history hasn't treated him the way it should have. It's hard to stick a label on his work." Jeffrey looked elated to be talking about all this—overeager, overcaffeinated, overjoyed. He'd already written the book in his mind. "And along the way he had time to teach at Brandeis and Columbia and City College, to launch a literary magazine that did some interesting things before it ran out of funding, and to have high-profile fistfights with Norman Mailer and Alfred Tomas."

"Who's Alfred Tomas?" Thea said.

"Painter," Adam said. "Wild man."

"Well, what do you think?" Jeffrey said to Thea. "Does he sound as if he deserves a biography?"

"It sounds like he deserves a miniseries," Thea said. "How come you've never told me about him, Weller?"

"There are many things I haven't told you about."

Adam was unhappy. Izzy had been a friend of his, but also a rival. Adam had believed he had defeated him, simply by outliving him. But this was the second time Izzy's ghost had appeared that day. It was as if Izzy were a representative of the dead, coming forward to claim him.

But he could outwit him. He could outwit his old dead friend. He didn't know what it was yet, but he was sure there was something in this situation that he could use to his advantage.

"Izzy was a remarkable writer and a remarkable man," Adam said. "He'd be a worthy subject for a biography. I'm not sure what you want from me, though."

Jeffrey's grin, if possible, grew even wider. He looked insane.

"What are you smiling about?" Adam said.

"You keep calling him Izzy. I've seen him referred to as Izzy, in letters. In the archives. But I've never actually met anyone who knew him well enough to refer to him by his nickname."

"Congratulations," Adam said. He wanted this encounter to be over. He wanted to be far away from this young man's ghoulish dampness.

"But to answer your question: what do I want from you? I want your help. First of all, I'd love to interview you. Your memories of him would be invaluable. And I'd like your help in locating people he knew."

Thea snorted. "Locating people? Try using Google. It sounds like you're asking the old man to research the book for you. He has bigger fish to fry."

She put her hand around Adam's bicep. He was glad he had worked out at the gym that morning.

The young man looked embarrassed. "I'm sorry. I mean…"

"It's all right," Adam said. "I loved Izzy. Of course I'll do what I can."

Meanwhile he was furiously thinking about how he could steer this project in a direction of his own choosing.

"It's still pretty hypothetical at this point," Jeffrey said. "I need to find the time to work on it. All my spare time goes into preparing for my classes. My course load is brutal." He put his fork into a pale slice of squash.

Brutal, Adam thought. Like working on a chain gang. Poor little professor.

Adam raised his glass and said, "To Izzy. And to your project." Hoping that this project wouldn't succeed.

"I do have a specific question for you," Jeffrey said. "I haven't been able to locate Ruth. I would love to interview her. If she's still alive." Ruth was Izzy's widow. The woman who'd been leaving messages on Adam's machine for two weeks.

Adam rolled his wine around in his mouth and considered this.

"She
is
alive. But she's a very private person. I can speak to her on your behalf, but I can't guarantee anything."

"If you speak to Ruth, that would be great. That's all I can ask."

You're on a first-name basis with her already, you little prick, Adam thought.

"I'd be happy to," he said.

After the lunch was over, Adam went to the men's room and extracted one of his secret blue saviors from his pillbox. Grandpa's little helper. He cupped his hands under a water faucet and slurped enough water to get the pill down. He was hoping Thea would accompany him back to his apartment.

Outside the restaurant, after the young man had left to catch a train back to New Jersey, Adam asked Thea if she was doing anything.

"It's two-thirty. Charlie awaits."

"You can't go back a little later?"

"You know better than that. Charlie can't be kept waiting." She kissed him—insultingly, on the cheek. "But I'll see you tomorrow."

Angular, intense, impersonal, she looked extraordinarily attractive in the harsh October light.

He wondered whether his eagerness to make love came from a desire to assert the rights of the living over the rights of the dead. In other words, a desire to deliver a fat Bronx cheer to his old friend. You are in your final resting place, in the Wood-lawn Cemetery, the intimate companion of chiggers and mites, and I'm in a warm apartment, fucking Miss Junior Wyoming.

But that would have to wait. He didn't ask what she'd be doing that night. He didn't want to play the lovesick suitor.

He made a mental note to call Ruth. He hadn't been planning to return her calls—she was a nudnik—but now he supposed he'd have to, if only because it was important to keep tabs on her, to make sure this wan little biographer never found her.

"You seem a little jumpy, Weller," Thea said. "You should take a Xanax." And she hailed a cab and was gone.

He
was
a little jumpy.

When Izzy was alive, reviews that mentioned either of them usually mentioned both. Because they'd been friends since boyhood, and because they wrote about the same terrain, critics could never resist the easy angle of writing about them as if they were the Martin and Lewis of Jewish American writing. (Bellow and Roth being the Hope and Crosby.) In the early 1990s, Adam finally began to feel as if he was shaking himself loose from his old friend, and after Izzy died the liberation seemed complete. Adam had published three books since then and had come to feel confident about having left Izzy behind. But during this past week—with all the phone calls from Ruth, and now with the appearance of the scholarly vegetarian—he had started to feel as if Izzy wasn't as gone as he should be. As if Izzy had thrust his hands out of the earth and was grabbing at his ankles, trying to pull him down into the land of the dead. Not yet, old friend, he thought. Not yet.