Breakable You Read Online Free PDF Page B

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.

----
Six
    Samir had arrived early, mainly because he wanted to leave early. Now it was 7:58, and although they hadn't arranged to meet until 8:00, the fact that he'd been waiting so long made it feel as if she were late. He was on the verge of going home, but then she appeared, rounding the corner, and he had that curious feeling he'd had