Breakable You (7 page)

More like twenty, he thought. But before he had a chance to say anything, she clasped his hand. "I have some exciting news. News about Izzy."

Has he come back from the dead? Adam thought. That was the only news about Izzy that would qualify as truly exciting.

But of course he knew what Ruth was going to tell him. Somehow she'd gotten wind of Jeffrey Lipkin and his project, and she was giddy at the thought that someone was going to write Izzy's biography.

"Lillian died this past summer," Ruth said. "Did you hear?"

Lillian was Izzy's sister. He didn't know what this had to do with anything.

"No. I didn't know," Adam said. "I'm sorry."

Actually, he didn't care. Lillian had always been a querulous, disagreeable woman; whether she was alive or dead didn't matter to him.

"I never liked her either," Ruth said, and Adam smiled, remembering why he used to be fond of her. "Anyway, her kids were closing up the house, and when they went through the attic, they found two huge chests filled with Izzy's papers. Evidently he'd been storing things at Lillian's for years. I'm not surprised he never told me. Izzy loved his secrets. Why Lillian never bothered to tell me I'll never know."

Adam was still a step behind. He was still trying to see how this connected to Jeffrey, even though he was beginning to see that it didn't connect at all. That maybe Ruth hadn't heard of Jeffrey yet.

"What was in it?" Adam said.

"Copies of his letters, for one thing. I started looking through them but I can't take it for more than a few minutes at a time. They make me miss him too much."

Adam tried to make a sympathetic sound, but what came out of him sounded, to his own ears at least, like a grunt of indifference, which was pretty much what he actually felt.

He was reminded of the reason he'd increasingly found Ruth a good person to avoid. There was something clammy and unappealing about her. She had become a professional widow.

During their marriage, Ruth had been Izzy's greatest supporter. Unlike Ellie, she had never had literary ambitions of her own, so her admiration for Izzy had always been free of any tinge of rivalry. (More than once, during their dinners together, while Izzy was in the midst of telling some story that Adam and Eleanor had heard many times before, a story that Ruth must have heard
hundreds
of times before, Adam had seen Ruth listening in a rapture of attentiveness, as if every word were a revelation.) And in the years since his death she'd become even more obsessively her husband's champion. She had turned all her energy and all her gifts toward the effort to promote his reputation. She wanted the world to finally recognize Izzy's merit, as it never really had during his lifetime. To Adam it seemed like a fool's mission: we die and the world flows on, and the idea that it will pluck your dead husband from the rut of his obscurity and carry his name into the future struck him as impossibly naive.

Adam was untroubled by the thought that the world would forget him as soon as he was gone, that his reputation would not merely grow dim but disappear. He wanted to hold on to his place in the world while he was alive, and he didn't give a damn what happened after he was gone.

He thought that Ruth, who fancied herself psychologically sophisticated, was evading the evidence of her own vanity. It's Ruth you mourn for, he wanted to say to her: it's your own disappearance you fear. But you can't admit it to yourself, so you make these frantic efforts on behalf of Izzy's memory.

"I don't know what to do with them," she said. "The letters. Brandeis has all the manuscripts, but they've never treated me very nicely. I wonder whether Columbia might want them."

Adam shrugged.

"Somebody must want them," she said. "Izzy wrote the most interesting letters!"

This, surely, was the moment to tell her about Jeffrey. It was Jeffrey who should have them—who should have the first look at them, at least. This was the moment to give her Jeffrey's number, surround her with a congratulatory embrace, and tell her that her dream might well come true. A new generation was going to learn about Isidore Cantor.

But he already knew that he was going to tell her no such thing. If he had any say in the matter, she and Jeffrey would never meet. She would never find out about him at all.

"But this is the thing I've been dying to tell you, Adam. This is the reason I've been calling you. It wasn't just letters. It wasn't just notebooks. There was also a manuscript."

"You're kidding me. They found the book?"

"They found the book."

Ruth was actually standing, as if it was obligatory to rise when the book was mentioned. She was radiant, quivering with awe. The book.

Neither of them needed to name it. There could be no question about what book they were referring to.

During the last ten years of his life, a period in which he had published two novels, Izzy had worked steadily on a third, which he kept saying was the best thing he had ever written. Izzy had been famously self-deprecating, so to hear him speak well of anything he was writing was a surprise. After Izzy died, Ruth had expected to find it in his papers, but she'd found no trace of it.

"Have you read it?" Adam said.

"I've read it. I have. I've read it twice. I read it on Saturday, the day I got it. I started at eight o'clock at night and I read all the way into the morning. And then I read it again on Monday and Tuesday. I wanted to read it more slowly, so I could appreciate all the nuances. I think it really is his best book. I think it's brilliant."

This, Adam thought, was unlikely. Izzy had written himself out many years ago. He'd had a thin vein of precious ore, had mined it conscientiously, but had exhausted it decades ago.

"That's wonderful, Ruth."

"I really think that this is the one that could do it, Adam. This is the one that could cement his reputation. It's funny. It's the 'breakout' book that his publisher was always asking for and he was never interested in writing. It turned out that he wrote it, even though he never tried to write it. And it's going to come out only after he died."

Adam nodded, seeking to infuse his smile with warmth, seeking to look as if he believed there was a chance that any of this was true.

Many, many years ago, he—well, he'd never been in love with Ruth, but there had been a period when she'd haunted his thoughts. He and Ellie and Ruth and Izzy used to get together often; inevitably the woman who doesn't accompany you home begins to seem more attractive than the woman who does. Ruth, the older woman, had seemed wise and calm and queenly, while Ellie in those days had seemed hectic and distracted, a blur of apologies and nervous jokes. One day when Izzy was out of town, Adam had dropped by, ostensibly to borrow a book but really because he had wanted to be near her. He hadn't actually thought that anything would happen, but he wanted to spend an hour in her orbit, in the charged atmosphere of their desire. She had made coffee and placed a tray on the coffee table, and then she'd sat next to him on the couch and leaned over, brushing against him, toward the sugar bowl, and dropped two sugar cubes into his coffee and said, "You take sugar, don't you? I suppose I should have asked." He didn't say anything, and then she said, "I feel like we're in a movie," and for some reason he knew that this was his cue to kiss her.

He wondered whether all this had happened on the same couch where they were sitting now It looked old enough. He remembered being surprised by how vulnerable she allowed herself to be—whispers and sighs and little moans.

They had spent the afternoon on the couch, though, come to think of it, he couldn't quite remember whether they'd actually, technically, made love. They'd done something, but he couldn't quite remember what.

How strange that they were once so hot for each other. He couldn't have summoned up any interest in her now, not even if he wanted to. Even if he could reverse the effects of global warming just by getting an erection for Ruth, the accomplishment would be beyond him.

What would she think if she saw him on the street with Thea? She'd definitely have a few acid things to say—about his second childhood or about the unfairness of a society in which older men can take up with younger women while older women are, as Eleanor had once pompously put it, "disappeared."

All these thoughts went through his mind in telegraphic form, in an instant.

"Thank you for telling me about this, Ruth. But is that all? Is there anything you need from me? Anything you want me to do?"

"Yes, there is, Adam. Thank you for asking. There
is
something I want you to do. I want you to read it. I think it's wonderful, but I'm his widow. I'm his wife. I need you to tell me if it's as good as I think it is. And if it is, I would love it if you could help me find a publisher. New Directions was faithful to Izzy, but I don't know anybody there anymore, and I'm not really sure they'd be the best publisher for him at this point anyway."

"Of course, Ruth. Of course I'll read it. And I'll do what I can."

"Wonderful," she said. "I'm so thankful."

She went to the bedroom and returned with a cardboard box and set it on the coffee table. He lifted the cover and took a look inside. The title of the manuscript was
So Late So Early
. He sneaked a look at the last page, not to see how it ended but to see how long it was. Six hundred pages. It would be a chore.

"If you could read it sooner rather than later, that would be a special favor to me," Ruth said.

"I'll try, Ruth, but I don't know. I've got a lecture to give at Bennington next week that I still haven't prepared for, and after that I'm committed to a weeklong workshop in Florence. And after that—I don't even want to tell you all the ridiculous commitments I've made."

"I'm sure those things are important, Adam, and I hate to impose on your time. But if you could read it sooner rather than later, I would appreciate it."

Something about her tone made him want to ask if there was a special reason she felt pressed for time. Ruth had had breast cancer a few years ago. Was she ill again? He didn't ask.

"It's big," she said, "but it's hard to put down. I told you I read it in a night; I wouldn't be surprised if you do too. Maybe I can't judge… I thought everything he did was great. But I really think you might end up agreeing with me that it was the best thing he'd ever written."

Doubtful, Adam thought. Doubtful.

"I have a feeling you might be right," he said, wondering if his utter lack of sincerity was obvious. "I'll get to it as soon as I can. This isn't your only copy, is it? I wouldn't want to lose your only copy."

"I have another. Don't worry. Izzy always made a carbon copy of everything he wrote."

A carbon copy! Adam was surprised that he'd forgotten. Though Izzy had lived half a block away from a copy shop, he'd made carbon copies of everything he wrote. For reasons that would remain a mystery, he didn't trust copy shops.

Known to all the world as sunny and sane, Izzy had had an odd obsessive secretive streak. It was so like him to hide his most cherished work at the home of his sister—his unliterary, uninterested sister. He was like some furred and furtive creature hiding bright objects in the darkest place he could find.

Adam looked at his watch. He tried to do it without her noticing, but she noticed.

"Do you have to go already?" she said.

"I wish I could stay, but I have about twelve different places I have to be in a half hour. All at once."

"You sure you wouldn't like to have some tea? I have some strudel, if you like. I can heat it up in a jiffy. I think I have ice cream too."

"I wish I could," he said.

"Then
do
. You just got here."

He imagined having to fight his way past her as she blocked the door. He didn't say anything.

Ruth got the message. "I'm sorry. I won't keep you." She stood up. "Sometimes it just gets so bleak," she said. "I'd say that all I have left is my daughter, but I don't even know if I can honestly say that I have my daughter anymore. I hardly ever hear from her these days."

She walked him to the door. Her excitement of a few minutes ago was all gone.

"I just feel so lonely," she said. "And lately I've been in so much pain that I can barely make it out of bed." For years she had suffered from arthritis. "Sometimes I still don't understand how everything could have ended up like this."

There was a limit to his ability to humor her. He was putting his coat on, and he thought he should probably just leave, but he couldn't stop himself from speaking.

"You're acting like a child, Ruth. It's like you've just found out that there aren't any happy endings. Where have you
been
? Hasn't it always been obvious that everything ends in shit?"

Ruth looked genuinely shocked. "That's a horrible way to look at things."

"Be that as it may. It's the truth."

"It hasn't ended in shit for you. You seem to be happy. You have three beautiful children. You have perfect teeth."

"Yes," he said, "I do have perfect teeth." Two years ago he'd had his mouth reconstructed and his teeth bleached.

"Well then." She was smiling, letting go of her self-pity. "And I hear you have a new girlfriend. With perky breasts."

"That's true too, Ruth. But I know that I'm likely to end up soiling my pajamas every night and not being able to clean myself. And not recognizing my three beautiful children. And by the time that happens, my perky-breasted girlfriend is going to be long gone. Izzy was lucky, when you think about it. He had his mind until the end. And he had you."

She didn't respond to this. In silence she unlocked her three locks. He kissed her chastely on the cheek and was slightly repulsed by her odor, although it was nothing more than the odor of an old woman. He wondered whether his own odor too was repulsive, and wondered why Thea was with him. Could it be that she didn't find his skin and his breath and his hair and his nostrils and his lips and his mouth and his teeth—could it be that she didn't find them repulsive? He held the cardboard box in the air as if it were something he was dying to get to, and said, "I'll call you."